


a flock of weary souls

by joosetta



Series: Sorcery-verse [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Magic, Necromancy, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 22:38:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1705106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joosetta/pseuds/joosetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek had a problem. Most specifically he had a Stiles Stilinski problem. It hadn’t always been so acute, it hadn’t always been so specific, but it had always been a problem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a flock of weary souls

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, quite a bit of license taken with some canonical details. Obviously AU after the end of 3b. This universe is probably not completely done with.
> 
> Clearly, in my mind, Derek is an over-thinker.

Derek had a problem. Most specifically he had a Stiles Stilinski problem. It hadn’t always been so acute, it hadn’t always been so specific, but it had always been a problem.

 At the moment, he was watching Stiles try and make a pyramid out of the individually wrapped candies Deaton kept behind the counter at the clinic for kids. He was stretched over the counter, knees balanced on a wheely chair, contorted so much that his T-shirt was riding up and baring a strip of skin on his back. If Derek squinted hard enough he could just about see the scrolling edge of the tattoo peeking out from under the hem of his stupid T-shirt. As he watched, Stiles deposited the last candy on the top of the pyramid, and enjoyed half a second of triumph before the whole thing collapsed.

He dropped back into the chair and slumped, glaring over at Derek.

 “Somehow, that was your fault,” he grumbled. Derek didn’t bother replying. Once upon a time, the biggest problem he would have had in a situation like this was holding his temper so he didn’t introduce Stiles’ head to the nearest hard surface. It was more complicated than that, nowadays.

Thankfully, Scott came out of the surgery and interrupted what was certainly going to rank in the top ten pointless arguments of Derek’s life. 

“Are you finally done?” Stiles said. Scott was looking at the candy all over the floor, so he wiggled a hand and it all sort of floated back up into the jar all by itself. Derek saw Stiles’ eyes flash gold under his lashes, and felt a lick of warmth in the pit of his stomach. It was wrong how hot the magic was. Wrong.

 “Yeah,” Scott shrugged his bag up higher on his shoulder. He looked tired. “Let’s go.”

 Stiles was driving, they were in the jeep, so Derek had to sit in the back. Once upon a time he wouldn’t have let that happen, but his car was in the shop, and it was just easier nowadays to let Stiles have his way. Even when he was humming the pina colada song and driving twenty over the speed limit. The back of the jeep was filled with math textbooks, print-outs about admission essays and empty coffee cups from Cuppa Joe’s.

“Did you say the cops were gone now?” Scott asked, halfway through changing his shirt. He kept nearly elbowing Stiles in the face, and the jeep swerved every time he did.

 “Yeah, it said on the scanner they left this morning, couldn’t find anything.”

Stiles was doing that thing, where he was having a conversation and completely neglecting to pay attention to important things like the position of his car on the road, or oncoming traffic.

“Will you watch the fucking road,” Derek snapped, and he reached over and shoved Stiles’ face round until he was looking in the right direction. Because it was Stiles, and he couldn’t be trusted to keep it there, Derek held his jaw for the rest of the journey.

“You’re a freak, you know that,” Stiles grumbled, and Derek ignored the way his words vibrated in his throat while he spoke.

“You are both freaks,” Scott said. “I’m so uncomfortable right now.”

 

\---

 

When Stiles had overheard _grave robbery_ on his totally illegal, pilfered police scanner, Derek had expected a few piles of dirt and a busted up coffin. He’d only really agreed to come along and investigate because Scott had asked, and Derek was trying to be more of a team player this year. It was a resolution. 

What they found was a hell of a lot more than just a casual grave robbery. The grave in question looked like it had been blown apart. The headstone was in eight pieces, there was a seven foot crater where the coffin had been. The turf was all churned up and blackened. Derek, Scott and Stiles just stood there and looked at it, incredulous.

“What the hell?” Stiles said, clambering around the mess, gingerly. He looked in danger of slipping into the hole. “This isn’t grave robbery. This is grave explosion. Do you think the body did this?”

“Something blew it up,” Scott said, crouching by the crater. Derek took a deep breath. The air smelled like stale coffee and leather; cops. He could just about pick the Sheriff’s scent out of the mix, the same detergent as Stiles, something else that was similar. Beneath all that, it was hard to pick up any other scent.

“Too many cops around,” Derek said. He nodded to the earth, which was all trampled with footsteps. “I can’t smell a damn thing.”

“There’s something,” Stiles was leaning over the edge of the crater. It was inevitable. He took a wrong step, and ended up face down in the mud at the bottom. It had been raining on and off all day, so the bottom of the hole was pretty soupy. Derek tried not to laugh too loudly.

“Ha, ha asshole,” Stiles said, shaking his head. There was mud all over his face and his grey tee, he spat a mouthful out. “Anyway there’s just-” he reached down, burying his hand up to the wrist in the soft earth. “There’s something here, man.”

Derek smelled the magic before he saw it, a sharp, piney smell, like resin. It was uniquely _Stiles_ and Derek twitched his head to the side reflexively. The mud was parting easily beneath Stiles’ hands, after a bit more digging he made a triumphant noise and held something above his head.

It was a Starbucks takeout cup. 

“That was not as dramatic as I expected,” Stiles said, looking down at it. “And now I’m all muddy.”

 

\---

 

They dropped off Scott first, and then Stiles took Derek back to the loft. He looked ridiculous, all covered in mud, and he parked, followed Derek up without even asking for an invitation. It hadn’t exactly been a very fruitful investigation, even if the Stiles did think the supernatural was involved, but the evening still had the potential to get interesting.

Because Derek had Stiles problem. Because nowadays Stiles wasn’t just a babbling moron who trailed along behind the wolves, stumbling into trouble. Nowadays Stiles was a sorcerer with enough power to take down pretty much anything, with a filthy mouth and wiry muscles he’d earned running around the preserve, who Derek suspected was secretly kind of a kinky little fucker, and now was casually _stripping off in the middle of Derek’s apartment._

“What the hell are you doing?” Derek said. Stiles was dropping his muddy T-shirt on the floor and starting on his jeans. On his back, the glyph tattoo rippled as his ribs and shoulders flexed. 

“Dude I’m all muddy, I can’t go back home like this, my dad will know straight away where I’ve been,” They may or may not have been slightly banned from crime scenes by the Sheriff. Stiles grimaced, kicking off his muddy jeans.  “I can borrow some of your clothes right?”

“No,” Derek said, but he went up to get some anyway. He didn’t anticipate getting them back, so he gave Stiles his least favorite T-shirt, and the jeans that were kind of tight. He didn’t think too hard about how well they fit Stiles. Once upon a time he would have drowned in them. 

“You’re such a peach D-man,” Stiles said. He washed his hands and face in the kitchen sink, then took the Starbucks cup they’d found out and put in on the counter. 

“Why did you even keep that?” Derek asked.

“It’s not right,” Stiles said. He turned it slowly. There were initials scrawled on the side, but they were impossible to decipher. The little box for an extra shot and hazelnut syrup had been ticked. There was a bright red curve of lipstick staining the edge. Stiles breathed out over the cup, and his eyes glowed. “There’s something not right about it.”

“Well the idea of enjoying a coffee in a graveyard is pretty weird,” Derek said, and Stiles shrugged, still looking at the cup. His eyes were still glowing, just a golden thread in his irises that shifted as he breathed. There wasn’t a single thing about his magic that Derek didn’t find ridiculously attractive.

“I once took ihop breakfast to my Mom’s grave and ate it there,” he said. “I don’t know why, I was having a bad day.”

Derek knew how that went. What he didn’t know was how to articulate the sentiment, so he didn’t say anything. Eventually Stiles sighed, and shoved the cup back into the pocket of his muddy jacket. He balled all the dirty clothes up.

“Thanks for the clothes man,” he said. “I’ll bring them back, promise.”

Derek waited until he was gone, before he knocked his head against the door. He had a big, big problem. A serious problem.

  

\---

  

He got a text, twenty minutes later:

 

_my dad clocked after 5 secs that we were at the graveyard_

_then he asked me why I was wearing ur shirt_

 

_i tried to say it was bcos of all our torrid lovemaking but for some reason he didnt believe me, guess im out of your league_

 

Derek had an official policy of not encouraging Stiles to text him, so he didn’t reply.

 

\---

 

Sometime that night, after Derek had gone to bed, and the air in the loft had that still, past-midnight feel, he woke up. Waking up in the middle of the night was never a good sign for a werewolf because usually it meant there was some clue, some slight noise or change in the air that indicated oncoming danger. He stood up, looked at his bed, wondering why he was awake. Quietly, he went down the stairs.

There was a woman standing in the middle of the loft. Derek didn’t recognize her, she was in a hospital gown, and her back was bare in the moonlight. Her dark hair was cropped short, and Derek couldn’t see her face, only the tender curve of her neck. There was something familiar about her. She turned round, slowly, and Derek thought, _right, I’m dreaming_. 

She wasn’t young, she looked like she was in her late thirties, with smile lines around her eyes and mouth. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. Derek couldn’t tell what she was saying. The stairs felt cold beneath his bare feet, and a car went past outside, painting the loft briefly in yellow light. He blinked and the woman was gone. Derek stood there for a really long time before he realized he wasn’t dreaming at all, she had really been there.

The loft smelled like antiseptic and perfume.

 

\---

 

Derek didn’t mean to, but the Camaro was done at the shop and he ended up heading to the Stilinski house the next morning, after he picked it up. He wasn’t a big subscriber to the ‘Nature of the Alpha, Nature of the Pack,’ stuff that some wolves believed, but he’d noticed that it was easier, since he’d fallen under Scott’s jurisdiction, to go out and seek advice from people. And Stiles was more and more becoming a useful person to seek advice from.

He appeared at the front door while Derek was still lingering in the car, in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, hugging his arms around his chest.

“Come in then, don’t just sit there like a creeper,” he called, so Derek went in.  “Dad’s still sleeping,” Stiles said. “I was making eggs.”

He pottered around the kitchen, and Derek took a seat at the table and just watched him. Stiles poured out a coffee for him without asking, black, and occasionally shoved eggs around in a pan. The tattoo was visible, shining through the threadbare fabric of his worn-in T-shirt. It was quiet, early, and Stiles was still sleepy, Derek could smell it- the smell of his bed, and his warm skin.

“Did something happen?” Stiles said, serving Derek up a ton of eggs on like, five slices of fried bread. 

“Don’t know,” Derek said. He ate for a bit, then added. “I saw something.”

Stiles dropped down into the chair opposite, wrapping both hands around his coffee mug and grimacing.

“Saw something like, what? Use words, Derek,” Stiles tilted his head. His hair was all flat on one side, he hadn’t cut it in a while, it was the longest Derek had ever seen it. Stiles was staring at him. Words, right.

“A woman, in my loft. She was just standing there one minute, the next she was gone,” Derek shook his head. “I wasn’t dreaming, she was really there. I think she was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear.”

“Freaky,” Stiles drained the last of his coffee, then looked at the empty cup. “Well if hearing her was a problem, I know someone who can help.”

 

\---

 

Lydia Martin lived in one of those massive McMansions that had popped up just after the highway had expanded and put Beacon Hills right on the commuter route. That was before she was born, before Derek was born actually, but the house still looked modern compared to the ranch-stile units further down town, or Stiles’ wooden-clad family home. Older than even those was the Hale house, but Derek didn’t think too hard about that, because remembering all the original fixtures, the worn wooden floorboards, the porthole windows in the attic, and the stone cellar, it just made him sad.

Lydia had a secure entry system at her gate and a pool. Derek vaguely remembered it, he’d probably lurked at one of her parties, back when he was into threatening people. Lydia came down the steps wearing a little leather skirt and a flowery top, and Derek was kind of amazed that she wasn’t cold. It was like 50 degrees out.

“Nice car,” she said, climbing in the back. Stiles curled around in the passenger seat to greet her, all eager like a puppy.

“Wait until you see what he’s done with the loft,” Stiles said. “It’s got interior design and comfortable furniture and stuff now. Like a proper bachelor pad.”

“Sit down and put your seatbelt on,” Derek said, and when Stiles didn’t immediately comply he helped, using a free hand to pin him to his seat. Stiles’ chest was warm and firm, and Derek could hear his heart battering away like it always did, twice as fast as any normal human. 

“Grabby,” Stiles commented, but he threw Derek one of those confusing smiles, just like he had that night when Derek had tattooed him, the smile that seemed to say _You know_ _I’m filthy, and I’m okay with that_.

Derek really, really had a problem. 

 

\---

 

The loft still smelled of perfume. Derek knew he wasn’t the only one who smelled it, because Stiles had gone quiet as soon as he arrived, smelling the air, and walking around, head tilted, like he was listening for something. His mood had changed, from playful to contemplative and worried. The worry smelled bitter, and his normally expressive face had settled into something hard to read. 

“So where did you see her?” Lydia said, and Derek pointed to the spot in the middle of the lounge area. He couldn’t see anyone anymore, but there was the persistent feeling that they weren’t alone. Lydia walked over, held a hand up. They both waited in silent.

“Definitely something,” Lydia said, “Can’t quite make it out though, do you have- wait, this will work.” She sat on the couch and leaned over Derek’s new fruit bowl. He’d bought it on a whim at the same time as the recliners, although he’d never actually bought any fruit for it. Stiles had made fun of it quite a few times, but it was nice quality, brushed metal and sleek. Lydia reached out a manicured nail and ran it around the edge. The bowl began to sing.

The smell in the loft got stronger. Derek could smell the disinfectant underneath the perfume, and a stronger scent, of illness, and sorrow. Stiles had tensed up, every inch of him tight and frightened. Derek wanted to say something, but Lydia was listening, her ear close to the bowl.

“I can hear her,” she said, softly. It felt like the whole loft was suspended in time, while she listened, and Derek smelled the particular scent of her magic, musty liked dried flowers. Finally, Lydia spoke. “She says, _I wish you didn’t see me like this_ \- just that, over and over. _I wish you didn’t see me like this._ ”

Lydia looked up, and the bowl stopped ringing. She looked sad, her bright pink lips turned down and pinched together. When Derek turned around, Stiles had disappeared. Lydia stood up, damping the last whisper of the bowl with her fingertips and then flattening her skirt. The smell of perfume and hospitals faded with the sound, and then, like all she had wanted was to be heard, the presence was gone.

“I think you’re being haunted,” she said. “Or you were being haunted. Where did Stiles go?”

Stiles had gone out to get some air, and reappeared five minutes later, stinking of dusty, old-paper sadness. You wouldn’t know to look at him, because his face was plastered with a pretty accomplished fake smile.

“Sorry,” he said. “Thought I sensed some magic outside, wasn’t anything though.”

His eyes flickered to Derek, because he _knew_ that Derek could hear that liar's wobble in his heartbeat. Derek didn’t say anything.

“Do you think it’s just a random haunting, then? You know, Casper the friendly ghost dropping by to spook Derek out a bit?” he said, shoving both hands in his pockets. Derek looked at Lydia and she frowned, looking at the bowl as if she was considering it. 

“When is anything that happens here ever random?” Derek said, and Stiles pulled a face, as if to say _good point_.

 

\---

 

Ghosts were something Derek had known about in the abstract. His life had always been filled with ghosts of the psychological sort; clicking past strains of cello music while he messed with his car radio, or avoiding bonfires, and the acrid stink of burning wood. He’d never actually been haunted. For the next few nights, nothing happened, then when he went down in the morning all his furniture had been moved, so there was a empty circle in the middle of the loft. Right where Derek’s coffee table had been sitting, he found a fistful of damp earth, and a crushed wolfsbane flower. There was no scent, no indication anyone else had entered the room.

The earth smelled familiar, and Derek pressed it between his fingers, wondering exactly what it smelled like. The scent was too faint, so he just cleaned up, carefully pushed all the furniture back into position, then called Scott.

  
\---

  
It was a Wednesday, so Scott turned up after school, with Isaac and Allison in tow. Derek wondered where Stiles was, but didn’t want to ask. He let them in, and Scott walked straight over to where the earth had been, touched the floor.

“Smells like the preserve,” he said. “Around your old house.”

Derek knew he’d gone completely still. Stiles had a phrase for it, _statue mode_ , for when something happened that knocked Derek for a loop. Dirt from around the old house felt a lot like a message, a personal one.

“If you’re being haunted, whoever it is probably needs something from you,” Allison said. She was standing outside the main arrangement of furniture in the loft, like even through the threshold she felt like she wasn’t welcome. “The bestiary says that ghosts usually have a purpose which is what makes them, you know, remain.”

“This isn’t the same ghost as before,” Derek sat down on the couch. “Smells different.”

“Stiles gave us something,” Isaac said, dropping his bag down and rummaging inside. “He couldn’t come, he has an essay, but he made some kind of poultice-” he pulled out a plastic baggie with a little bundle of herbs and cloth inside. He handed it over to Derek, and when he opened it up, the smell of Stiles was sharp and sudden. He flinched away, even as he reached inside to take the bundle out.

“Eau du Stilinski,” Scott said, laughing. “I think he put his blood in it.  Anyway he says it works like a charm, keeps ghosts from bothering you.”

After they left, Derek dutifully hung the charm over his doorway. The scent of Stiles permeated the whole apartment, sharp like pine resin, green like cut grass and just a bit smoky. It followed Derek into his dreams, where he was wandering through Beacon Hills, through empty streets, with nothing to follow but that scent.

Two days later, when he woke up, his furniture had been moved again, and the charm was where the earth had been, shredded into pieces and devoid of magic.

 

\---

 

“Okay, I want you to know I am a bit reluctant to do this,” Stiles said. Derek had cornered him in his room, where he had been hunched over his computer typing and occasionally tossing crumpled up post-its in the direction of his trash can. He’d looked a little guilty when Derek turned up at the door, but Derek wasn’t really sure why.The Sheriff had let him in, hadn’t even made a comment when he’d headed straight upstairs.

“I’m not going to force you,” Derek said, but it came out kind of accusatory, and Stiles frowned. “What I mean is,” Derek corrected himself. “It’s your magic, you do what you want with it.”

Still wrong. Stiles looked kind of sad at that, perched on the side of his bed. He was already dressed like he was going to go to sleep, in pajama pants and a too-large grey T-shirt. BEACON HILLS SHERIFF’S DEPT was printed across the front in faded red letters. 

“Dude, I want to help you,” he said. “I think I found something.”

He went over to his bookshelf, which was overflowing with stacks of printouts and textbooks and other more esoteric publications. While he was rummaging around, Derek caught a thread of a familiar scent, he followed it, past the nest of Stiles’ bed, over to his bedside table where his cellphone was lying next to a ten dollar bill and a clock radio, a half empty strip of adderall and a stale glass of water. All these ordinary things, things that smelled of Stiles, and one thing that was different, one thing that smelled different.

It was a watch, with a brown leather strap, and a gold and mother of pearl face. It looked well used- the leather was worn away and pale where the catch had sat for years, decades maybe. The face was scratched a bit, but it was still going, the second hand flicking round. The watch smelled of ancient perfume, the ingrained scent objects got when the same person used them every day. It was the same perfume that Derek had smelled in the loft, that first night.

“Here,” Stiles said, and Derek jerked back. He wasn’t sure if Stiles had seen him looking at the watch. “I found this in the grimoire. It’s a potion, if we make it and dab it on our eyelids we can see the dead and speak to them. So you can confront your ghost.”

“I think it’s more than one ghost,” Derek said softly. Stiles’ face contorted. He’d definitely seen Derek looking at the watch.

“Hope you can get some freaky herbs,” he said, effectively sapping the tension from the room. “Because this is a complicated brew. We should probably ask Deaton for some help.”

 

\---

 

Deaton had some of the ingredients, but the rest they managed to find at a new-age shop a couple of blocks from the cinema. Derek had to stand and let the owner tell him about how he needed to cleanse his chakra and she could give him a deal, two for one on a pressure point massage and some acupuncture, while Stiles rifled through the jars of dried stuff and sniffed them.

“Maybe you should have taken her up on it,” Stiles said, once they were back in the Jeep. He pulled a truly shocking U-turn across two lanes of traffic so they could head towards the loft. “You seem pretty tense.” 

“I’m not tense,” Derek said, but even to his own ears it sounded completely untrue. 

Stiles didn’t say anything, probably because he was even worse. He drove the whole way with both hands braced on the wheel, all the muscles drawn tight in his bare forearms, and his fingers drumming. He was twitchy, beyond twitchy actually, and when he got like that Derek felt the urgent need to just pin him against something flat and hold him still.

“We don’t have to,” Derek said, when they pulled up to the loft. “Maybe it will just go away.”

Stiles rolled his eyes so hard, Derek was surprised he didn’t pull a muscle or something,

 

\---

 

The potion took four hours to brew. It was only supposed to take one, but Stiles kept making mistakes, accidentally dropping too many grains of salt, or more significantly, infusing the whole thing with way too much dogwood and making it catch fire, somehow. Derek just watched him do his thing, occasionally coming to the rescue with the fire blanket, until Stiles stepped back from the saucepan, scrubbed a hand over his forehead and claimed he was done.

“Pretty much, anyway,” he said. “Just needs to settle then I’ll add the blood.”

“Blood,” Derek said, slowly. They had not purchased any blood.

“Oh, mine,” Stiles said. “Just a drop, don’t worry.” He stepped away from the saucepan, the _new_ saucepan, the one that Derek was never ever going to use again, and dropped onto one of the recliners. He was red-faced and sweaty, and smelled of dried herbs, and metal and magic.  

“Do you-” Derek said, and Stiles flailed an arm up, stopping him before he could continue.

“Dude, if you are going to ask me if I really want to do this one more time, I am going to smack you. I don’t even care that I’ll break my hand. I’ll smack you right on your handsome face.”

“You wouldn’t be fast enough,” Derek grumbled, reaching out to grab Stiles’ wrist and hold it for a moment, long enough to feel the rush of his blood inside, and long enough for Stiles to suddenly smell of thick arousal and curiosity. Derek let go. This was not helping with his Stiles problem.

“Ugh,” Stiles said. “You confuse me in bad ways.” He didn’t seem mad though, and got up and went back to the saucepan. Derek smelled rather than saw him prick his fingertip - the loft was suddenly overwhelmed with that piney, smokey _Stiles_ scent, and then the sharp stink of magic.

“Tah-dah,” Stiles said, pouring the potion out into a jar. It was perfectly clear, and there was a lot more of it than Derek had expected. 

“How do we use it?” he asked. Stiles brought it over then dipped his fingertip in. The potion was ever so slightly viscous, and was eerily odorless. 

“Close your eyes,” Stiles said, and Derek did. He stood completely still as Stiles dabbed the potion onto his eyelids with a careful, steady fingertip. The potion tingled, and Derek thought he saw lights sparkle over the back of his eyelids, just for a moment.

“Okay, you can open them and do me,” Stiles said. Derek did, and nothing had changed. Stiles was still standing in front of him, still a bit flushed, heart thudding away too fast in his chest. He closed his eyes, and his dark eyelashes lay against his cheekbones. It was like he had been crafted perfectly, and with great attention to detail, in order to give Derek the maximum amount of sexual frustration. Derek dipped his finger in the potion, then braced his thumb on Stiles’ cheek, gently painting it across the sweep of Stiles’ eyelid. Derek had to take a deep breath before he did the other one.

“This is weirdly erotic,” Stiles said, and Derek grimaced. Stiles opened his eyes, and his face crinkled into a smile. “I like how we do weird, erotic things now.”

“I don’t,” Derek said, because there was no way for Stiles to tell he was lying. “Now what?”

Stiles put away the jar and then made some space between them, deliberate in the same way all his careful invasions of Derek’s space were. It felt like they were making a circle. Stiles closed his eyes, and opened them. They were limned in bright gold, and looked ancient in his young face.

_“Open our eyes, so that we may see.”_ He said, and magic was poured into every syllable. A light flashed in the loft, so bright that Derek had to squeeze his eyes shut. He felt the potion tingle, almost burning. Then there was a sharp, completing snap, like a released rubber band. He straightened and opened his eyes.

There was a woman standing in his kitchen. 

If it hadn’t been so creepy, it would have been hilarious, because she was right beside Stiles, and when he spotted her he leapt about five feet in the air and fell over the stools beside the breakfast bar, landing in a tumble behind them.

“Ugh,” he said, scrubbing at his elbow. The woman looked down at him dispassionately. She wasn’t the woman who had first visited, and she smelled different, felt new. She was In her forties, with blond hair, running to grey, and a serious, sad face. She didn’t look visibly dead, but she had a scrape on her forehead, deep enough that a single line of blood was running down the side of her face. She had a cashmere cardigan and a tweed skirt on, and one of her shoes was missing. She had tan stockings on.

She smelled like gasoline and burning plastic.

“You can see me,” she said.

“Yeah, kinda,” Stiles scrambled up. “Sorry, you gave me a fright.”

The woman tilted her head, then shrugged. It was a funny, non-reaction, but Derek supposed that when you were a ghost, your attitude to things probably changed.

“Why are you here?” Derek asked. It came out a bit like he was interrogating her, although that hadn’t been his intention.

“I don’t know,” she said. “One minute I was gone, the next I was here. Well I didn’t start here.”

There was blood, Derek spotted it, running down the back of her leg onto his kitchen floor. Something was wrong, behind her. She was hurt. He could almost see in the reflection on the steel saucepan. Blood, shredded flesh. Stiles hadn’t seen, Derek knew because he seemed calm, and normally he wasn’t great with blood and gore.

“Where did you start then?” Stiles said, gently.

“At the big rock, in the woods,” she said. “The others told me to come and find you. They said you would help.”

Her expression changed, softening until she was smiling almost tenderly. It was an abrupt change, as if now that her message had been delivered, she had sunk back into another state of mind, one from before.

“Lucy, darling,” she said, looking at Stiles. “You know we can’t go down to the stables until you finish all your homework.”

She turned, to walk away and Derek didn’t think, he just lunged over, covering Stiles’ eyes with his hand. He was glad he did. What he saw then was not something Stiles would have appreciated seeing. The woman took one bloody footstep and disappeared. Derek held Stiles a little longer than he needed too, feeling the way his shoulders and ribs rose and fell with each quick breath. He was nervous. 

“Sorry,” Derek let him go, slowly unfurling his hand. Stiles stepped away, blinking. “You didn’t want to see that. Sorry.”

“I knew her,” Stiles said, slowly, but he didn’t elaborate, and Derek didn’t feel like he was equipped to ask.

 

\---

 

“Did you and Stilinski sort out the ghost crap?” Isaac asked, a week later. He was lounging across one of the couches at Cuppa Joe’s, which was where Derek apparently had to go if he wanted to spend time with his pack nowadays. Everyone else was busy, it was just Isaac which was normally fine, because Isaac wasn’t in need of constant conversation like the others, and seemed content to sip at his coffee and chill quietly. Occasionally he made sarcastic comments about other patrons.

“Not really. I haven’t had any ghosts since, but no progress deciphering what she said,” Derek answered. They had investigated just about every connection to ‘a big rock in the woods’ that was possible, and spent a good amount of time just tramping around the preserve looking for it, to no avail.

He stretched his legs out and stared at his coffee cup. Foam was clinging to the rim and it looked like oddly shaped continents on a china sea. It was possible that Derek had been struggling to sleep. He was exhausted. 

“How’s Stiles?” Isaac asked, and Derek stared at him. He shrugged. “What? He talks to you.”

Stiles talked to everyone. It was something that he was extremely talented at. The other day, he had talked to Derek for nearly an hour about the plastic gap in Playstation 2 game boxes used for holding a memory card. He got the feeling that was not what Isaac meant.

“He seems fine,” Derek said, which wasn’t precisely true, but wasn’t too much of a lie either. Really Derek didn’t want to describe the manifold tiny ways in which Stiles wasn’t fine, because he knew how weird it would be to tell Isaac _he keeps his mom’s watch by his bed_ or _he has enough power to rearrange the stars in the sky and he’s terrified of it_.

“He’s acting a bit crazy at school,” Isaac said. “Scott seems to have a lid on it though.”

A while ago, that wouldn’t have been comforting to Derek. Now he trusted Scott enough to know that if Scott had a lid on it, things were under control. His phone buzzed next to his empty coffee cup. A second later, so did Isaac’s. It was Stiles.

 

_yo blood donor van was overturned and robbed on 144 west near the courthouse come now_

 

“Ugh,” Isaac said. “He can be such a pushy asshole. I don’t know how you hang out with him so much.”

Derek hadn’t noticed hanging out with Stiles any more than anyone else, but he wasn’t in the mood to argue.

 

\---

 

When Stiles had said the blood van was overturned, what he really meant was it had been torn apart. It was turned over, and the visible side of the vehicle looked like it had been blown up by some kind of explosion. In the ensuing chaos, all the blood had been taken.Derek knew why Stiles had asked them to come; the air stank of magic a whole two blocks before the crime scene was even visible. By the time Derek and Isaac arrived, a big post-work crowd had gathered around the police line and they were all taking pictures with their cellphones. A whole block had been closed off. Derek followed his nose to Stiles, who was talking agitatedly to Deputy Parrish.

“Come on, at least tell him I’m here. I promise he needs to hear what I have to say.”

Parrish was looking at Stiles like he might have heard the playstation memory card conversation too and didn’t have a high opinion of what Stiles had to say in general. Derek waited until he walked off, then headed over, putting a hand on Stiles’ back, right where the tattoo was, hidden beneath layers of jacket, hoodie and probably three or four T-shirts.

He felt Stiles shiver.

“Dude, you took ages. I know you were just lurking at Joe’s.”

“Traffic was bad,” Derek removed his hand. Scott was at the police line too, trying to lean past one of the other deputies there so he could sniff the air a little better. Derek doubted he was having any luck. Apart from the pervasive stink of unknown magic, the air was too muddled with the smell of all the onlookers and the cops.

There was one dropped blood bag on the road, burst and leaking blood onto the damp asphalt. The iron smell was strong.

“Who would fucking steal blood?” Isaac said, shoving both hands in his pocket. He had the collar of his wool coat turned up. “I mean, grave robbery is something. Maybe there were like, gold teeth and jewelry on the dead bodies, but blood?”

“Blood is powerful,” Stiles said, sounding distracted. He was looking over at the other side of the street. It was just an abandoned stretch of sidewalk, next to a bus stop. Derek and Isaac just stood and watched as he jogged over there, crouching down and inspecting something on the ground. Whatever it was, it was small enough that Derek couldn’t see what it was when he picked it up.

“What is he doing?” Scott said. Isaac just shrugged as if to say _it’s Stiles, who fucking knows?_

Eventually Stiles came back, just as the fire service rolled up to try and flip the truck back onto its wheels. He had something pincered between his fingertips, a lonely cigarette butt. He held it up and they crowded round, the three of them, like a little werewolf huddle. On the end of the cigarette, around the filter, was a bright red lipstick mark.

 

\---

 

“Cemetery,” Stiles said, putting the cup down on his kitchen table. “Blood donor van,” he put the cigarette next to it. There was no denying that it was the same shade of red lipstick. The Sheriff still had his skeptical face on, but Stiles wasn’t done.

“Magic,” he said. “If you are asking yourself, gee, how could a grave and a blood donor van just explode? Well the answer, like everything these days, is _magic_.”

The Sheriff raised both eyebrows, and then a hand. Stiles stopped talking.

“I know,” he said. “I pretty much figured that out when we found no indication of any explosives in the cemetery.”

“So you admit that you need our help?” Stiles said. His voice was high and a bit excited, and Derek wanted to just flatten a hand on his shoulder and calm him, dampen the vibration running through him like Lydia had silenced his humming fruit bowl. He didn’t.

“Maybe,” the Sheriff said, with a wry little smile. “Listen son, I’ll appreciate any help you can give, but you gotta stop hijacking crime scenes. At the end of the day, we need physical evidence so someone can be convicted.”

He had a particular way of dressing down Stiles, a surprisingly delicate touch for a man that on the surface seemed to be all rough edges and whisky.

“Fair point,” Stiles said, “We can do that, right Derek?”  


Well that was just bullshit. There was only one person who kept dragging others to active crime scenes and contaminating evidence, and it certainly wasn’t Derek. He just glared at Stiles, hoping that the message was clear. The Sheriff laughed.

“Is there anything you can do to track whoever is doing this?” he said, tapping the cup and then the cigarette butt. “I mean, a _why_ would be pretty good as well. This is the first time I have ever had a bunch of skeletons, and ten gallons of blood being stolen.”

“ _Ten gallons_?” Derek spluttered, unable to keep it in. At the same time, Stiles blurted, “Skeletons? What the fuck?”

“The van was on the way to the hospital after a blood drive at the mall,” the Sheriff said. “It was full to bursting. That grave? It was a over hundred years old, a family plot. There were at least six people down there. We found no trace of their remains, so the grave robber must have taken them. So yeah, skeletons.”

“Bones and blood,” Stiles said. “That’s creepy. Wait-” he leapt out of his chair, and ran out of the kitchen. Derek heard him fall twice on his way up the stairs. The Sheriff had an expression on his face that was the very definition of long-suffering.

Stiles came back down the stairs with a spiral-bound notebook tucked under his arm and his arms full of random items; a standing mirror, a plastic toolbox and a lighter. He dumped it all on the kitchen table. His dad just stared at it, impassive.

“You gonna cast a spell?” he said, not looking particularly troubled by the idea.

“Yep,” Stiles said, flicking open the notebook to a page that was overflowing with his scrawling handwriting. Inside the toolbox were little plastic baggies of dried herbs, minerals and other ingredients. He put the mirror beside the cup and cigarette, then placed a careful pinch of iron filings between them. “I tried this one out the other day,” he said, clearing away everything else so it was just the cup, the cigarette, the mirror and the filings on the table.“You can use it to find the owner of an object. The person who used it. If it works you see their face in the mirror. I was going to- well anyway, I did it with one of Scott’s lacrosse gloves, it totally worked.”

The sheriff stood at Stiles’ shoulder and Derek joined him. The air began to smell of magic, and Stiles hunched his shoulders up. The top curl of the glyph tattoo, just emerging from the back of his collar, glowed gold. He lit the iron filings and they flared up with bright blue sparks, gobbled up by the fire in seconds and replaced with a thread of smoke, heavier than was scientifically probable. 

“ _Show me,_ ” Stiles said, in his other voice. As the smoke passed over the mirror, something happened, a shifting of shape and color, and a woman’s face appeared. It was only for a split second, long enough to see she was in her mid forties, with dark hair and a pointed, beautiful face. Her lips were painted bright red. Derek couldn’t be sure, but he thought, for a moment, her eyes flickered up to meet his. Then the smoke passed over the mirror, and she was gone. Stiles sucked in a huge breath and dropped his head on the table.

“You okay?” Derek asked. The Sheriff dropped a hand on the back of Stiles’ head, ruffling his hair.

“Yeah,” Stiles said, into the table. “It was harder this time around.” He sat up.

“Well I know who that is,” The Sheriff said, “But it doesn’t exactly help. Because if she’s doing magic, digging up bodies and blowing up blood vans, then we are in a _lot_ of trouble.”

“Who is she?” Derek asked. The Sheriff screwed up his face like he didn’t want to say.

“It’s the new District Attorney. Mandy Dawson.”

 

\---

 

After the Whittemores left, there had been an interim DA appointed, while a replacement could be found. That had dragged on for a while, reported in exhausting detail in the local papers. Derek had not really been paying much attention. Eventually the job had gone to Mandy Dawson, a former resident of Beacon Hills who had moved back about six months before, around about the time when Derek had been kind of occupied with Stiles being Nogitsune, and all that stuff. 

She’d been a clear candidate, loads of experience, and came from one of those old Beacon Hills families, the _Dawsons_ just like the _Hales_ had been, once upon a time. Since her appointment she had proved to be rather good at her job, with a uptick in prosecution success, and a brisk, efficient manner with the press.

She was not exactly a sterling candidate for someone who might be using magic to steal skeletons and blood. Stiles, of course, immediately believed she was evil.

“Look, she looks like a comic book villain,” he said, clicking through the gallery of pictures on the Beacon Gazette website. “She has a single streak of grey hair. She wears pointy black stilettos. She turned up suddenly? Suspicious! She’s lurking around crime scenes? Suspicious!”

“She moved here when the DA job came up,” Derek said. He was sitting on Stiles’ bed watching him get all worked up. “That’s not suspicious. She wanted the job. Plus, that was almost a year ago, creepy stuff only started happening recently.”

Stiles made a face. Derek decided to keep going. 

“Okay, the Starbucks cup? It could have blown in from anywhere, the weather’s been shitty. The blood van blew up a block away from the courthouse, where she _works_. None of this is damning, all of it is explainable.”

“She’s evil,” Stiles said. “I’m magic and my all powerful sorcerer magic is telling me she’s evil.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Derek said. Stiles sighed, slammed his laptop shut then flounced over onto his bed and flopped down beside Derek. He rolled on to his front in a huff. The back of his T-shirt was riding up, baring a good stretch of his back, and the tattoo. He was less than a foot away and Derek reached over and touched it, running his thumb over the bottom edge of the glyph.

It felt warm, and as he traced the pattern of black ink, it flickered gold, got warmer. Stiles shifted restlessly against the bed. He turned his head to the side, so he could look up at Derek, and his hooded eyes were unreadable. His mouth fell open.

“Does it feel nice?” Derek asked, amazed at how mild the question sounded, considering. Considering he was straining the inseam on his jeans with his dick, just from three seconds of physical contact. 

“You fucking know it does,” Stiles said, and smiled. He was a seventeen year old virgin and his dad, the Sheriff was down there watching college football on the TV, probably an arm’s length away from a shotgun. Also this was _Stiles_ , the unlikely cornerstone of a pack that Derek had not even intended to be part of. Derek withdrew his hand, and just for old time’s sake, he went out the window. 

“I will sex you one day!” Stiles shouted out the window after him.

 

\---

 

The community college had a library with a few private reading rooms at the back that you could book if you were registered. Stiles was doing some kind of college credit thing there on the weekends, so he booked one in the name of intensive magic-stuff research. They spread everything out over the table, and Derek just watched as Kira and Allison pored over maps of the preserve and Stiles and Lydia argued about the specific wording of spells in the grimoire. He wasn’t entirely sure why he had been invited and said as much.

“Eye candy,” Stiles and Lydia said at the same time. They looked at each other and smirked. Derek was pretty terrified by their friendship.

“Did you know there was another big creepy old house in the preserve?” Kira said, then looked up at Derek with a grimace. “Sorry,” she added. “I didn’t mean to say that your old house is creepy, although it is, but thats not really your- uh.”  


“Don’t talk,” Derek said. Her mouth snapped shut, but she looked kind of grateful that he’d given her an out. “I know the place. It used to belong to Caleb Warren. He was the guy that founded Beacon Hills.”

“Oooh, have you been to the house?” Stiles said, peering over the map. The Warren house was perched up on the ridge, half a mile out into the preserve, at the end of a long dirt road. Or at least it had been. Derek sighed. 

“It was demolished before I was born,” Derek said. “That map is from 1982. Nowadays that’s a scenic view-point for hikers. There’s nothing there.”

“This is literally pointless,” Allison said sourly. “No-one is going to just mark a big rock on a map. Did you find anything?" 

The question was directed at Lydia who had the grimoire in front of her, and four other books that she claimed to have ordered off the internet. It frightened Derek that powerful magical books could just be bought online with a credit card.

“Well we found a whole bunch of spells that require human bones and blood, and none of them are very nice,” Lydia said. “I think its fair to say that whatever this mysterious magician is up to, it’s unpleasant and they are probably evil.”

Beside her, Stiles held up a book open to an illustration that was rather grisly. He waggled his eyebrows over the top of the book at Derek. 

“I’m going for coffee,” Derek said. He was fed up sitting in a little room with nothing to do. When he got up, Stiles grabbed his jacket. “You’re not coming,” Derek said, but of course, Stiles ignored him.

 

\---

 

“Hey, have you been haunted at all again?” Stiles asked, when they were outside the library. Derek headed straight for the car, hunching his shoulders against the freezing wind. A few pundits had been making noises about snow that morning, and Derek could see where they were coming from. The sky was almost black with threatening clouds.

“Hey,” Stiles said, standing by the passenger side door of the car. “Hey you know why I’m asking. Has she been back?”

Derek met his eyes over the car roof, and they both stood there. Derek had the keys in his hands, halfway down towards opening the door. Stiles seemed to tighten up, shoulders rising, and then unravel, sinking down a bit inside himself.

“I see,” he said. Derek opened the car and they climbed in. Stiles was quiet all the way to the Starbucks three blocks over, and quiet while Derek ordered; black coffee and a latte, two pastries, to go. He didn’t speak until they were at the end of the counter waiting for their drinks.

“I just thought maybe if she came back, I could see her,” he said. He had his thumbs inside the sleeves of his hoodie and was choosing to look at them rather than Derek.

“Yeah,” Derek said, but wasn’t sure how to elaborate. When he got the coffees he passed the latte to Stiles. “Maybe that isn’t a good idea.”

Stiles jerked, a whole body movement that nearly spelled the end for his coffee. He shook his head, quickly, but kept his lips pursed together and didn’t say anything, even when they got back in the car and Derek didn’t make the turning to go back to the community college. They drove for a while, and Stiles sunk down into the passenger seat and slurped at the foam on his coffee.

“She mostly wasn’t lucid,” Stiles said eventually, when they were further out of town and he probably had figured out where Derek was taking him. “Towards the end, anyway. But she had her moments. I’d go to the hospital after school, and I’d never know who would be there, if she’d remember me, or just be a stranger. One time I turned up, and it was like she’d never been sick.”

“She’d had some surgery, because there was a bleed on her brain, and it made her loads worse. I don’t think she’d had a good day for a month. So I was kind of surprised. Usually I just did my homework beside the bed and she wouldn’t even really know I was there, but that day she wanted to chat, kept asking me about my friends, what I was enjoying about school.”

Stiles was frowning, and he smelled sad, but not in an uncontrollable way. He was so far down in the seat he probably couldn’t been seen through the window. Derek recognized the impulse to be hidden.

“She said to me, _Stiles, even when I’m gone, I promise I’ll always be with you_. She promised me that she’d be with me the whole time. I know it sounds cheesy, but I believed her. She never had a good day after that one, but it took another two months before she died.”

Derek thought about Stiles, still in elementary school, heading to the hospital after class every day, hoping that he might get another one perfect day where his mom remembered who he was. Day after day for two months, until finally she was gone altogether. The thought made him angry, in the same helpless way he was angry that he never got to say goodbye to _his_ Mom - angry that the last conversation they’d had was some petty argument about how he never put his dirty basketball kit in the laundry basket.

“It’s kinda cold,” Stiles said, when they pulled up outside the cemetery. Derek had a coat in the back of the car, his winter one, leather lined with fleece, and he handed it over to Stiles, who put it on over his own hoodie and smiled.

“Thought we could have breakfast,” Derek said, tossing him the pastries in a brown paper bag. 

 

\---

 

Stiles led Derek down through the cemetery to his mother’s headstone. She had a nice plot, just past a row of cherry trees with a simple headstone. It looked like it was cleaned regularly, the inscribed words neatly accented in black paint.   
  


_Claudia Stilinski_

_Wife, mother and friend._

 

The ground was wet and cold but they sat down anyway, and drank their coffee, keeping their fingertips warm on the cups. Stiles didn’t smell too sad, he was calm instead.

“I did always feel like she was around,” he said, and tapped his chest, just like his mom had. “Is that weird?”

“Stiles,” Derek said. “I am a werewolf. We’re hunting a grave robber. My uncle came back from the dead and rents a condo downtown. Life is weird.”

Stiles burst into laughter at that, his own particular, full body laugh. He cracked up so hard he arched right forward and dropped his head onto the damp earth. He stayed there, and it took Derek a moment to realize that he wasn’t laughing anymore. Derek put down his coffee, and moved closer, putting one hand on Stiles’ shoulder, and another on the back of his head. 

“Ugh,” Stiles said, thickly. “I hate this, I hate this.”

“Yeah,” Derek said, and stroked his hair until he was done.

They finished their breakfast and walked back past the grave that had been blown up. There was still a sizable hole, half full of muddy water, but the headstone had been partly re-assembled. It was ancient, the stone worn from centuries of rain and decay, covered in patterns of lichen and moss. Stiles stood in front of it and squinted, pushing his hair back from his forehead. He was wearing new white sneakers and they were black with mud.

“Check it out,” he said, and spread his hands. His eyes flashed, and the remaining pieces of headstone rose up out of the mud. Stiles fit them together like a jigsaw, and the seams in the old rock glowed, until it was whole again.

It was an intricate, old fashioned headstone, with elaborately carved decorations. It was framed with pillars, and encircled with worn-away leaves and flowers. A skeleton sat at the crest of it, holding a mining pick. Underneath was carved a single name.  
 

_WARREN_

 

“Oh,” Stiles said, scratching at his head. “Well. Do you think that’s a coincidence?” 

Derek just raised his eyebrows. Stiles should know better than to ask that question nowadays.

 

\---

 

They went up to the preserve that evening, when Scott had finished at Deaton’s clinic. Derek had tried to persuade Stiles not to come, but the argument had lost a lot of its weight since Stiles had become able to stop a thousand bullets in the air with one hand and breathe fire and stuff. Scott still smelled of sick dogs and hand sanitizer when he turned up, Allison had her bow, and Kira had a baseball bat. Derek was aware that they looked ridiculous.

“If anyone asks, we’re larping,” Stiles said, which would have been helpful if Derek had even known what it meant.

“Do you really think there’s something up there?” Isaac asked. He had a scarf wrapped around his neck so high his face seemed to be just poking out of the top of it. Isaac had always run a little colder than other werewolves. He wore fingerless gloves and nearly carried it off.

“It’s worth checking out,” Stiles said, jiggling on the spot. He still had Derek’s coat on, and he looked ridiculous in it. “Cold as balls though.”

It wasn’t a long hike from the highway, a mile or two down a wide hiking trail, up onto the ridge and along to where the trees thinned out and there was a clearing, just about big enough to once have held a house and grounds. Stiles hummed under his breath the whole way, walking with a spring in his step and occasionally smelling of magic as he cast his eyes around the forest, glowing gold.

“How is it that the only sorcerer in the history of the earth with ADD is someone we know,” Isaac grumbled. Scott swiped a hand full of claws at him vaguely, but slow enough that he could duck away.

The clearing where the Warren house used to stand was empty. It was quite a popular picnic spot in the summer, because it had great views of the rest of the preserve, looking out towards the ocean. It was just a stretch of damp grass and scrub, not even a fragment of the old building left. When they got closer though, Derek smelled something.

“It’s your old house again,” Scott said, wrinkling his nose. “And wolfsbane. Really strong.”

Stiles had dropped his backpack on the ground and was pulling something out. Clear liquid in a jar.

“There’s a ghost here,” he said. “I can feel it. Come here."

They stood around and let Stiles paint the potion on their eyelids. He hesitated at Derek, gave him a sneaky little smile and leaned a little too close. It tingled just like before, left a flicker of bright lights on the back of his eyelids.

“ _Open our eyes so that we may see_ ,” Stiles intoned and there was a crack of light across the dark clearing and when Derek opened his eyes there was someone standing behind Scott who hadn’t been there before. Stiles saw where he was looking and scrambled round.

“Woah,” he whispered. 

“Hey bro,” the ghost of Laura said. “Took you long enough.”

 

\---

 

Laura just looked like she had the last time Derek saw her. She had her motorcycle leathers on, and her hair was freshly highlighted, because she’d had it done the day before she flew out to Beacon Hills. He could see the silver chain of her triskele necklace just at the edge of her grey T-shirt. His grey T-shirt, because Laura had always had a habit of stealing his clothes. She wore his boxers more than she wore actual woman’s underwear. She _had_ worn his boxers, that is. She didn’t wear any boxers anymore.

Derek felt like he was drowning. He wasn’t breathing was he? He couldn’t tell. Time had stopped.

“You look like shit,” she said, and Derek thought she was talking to him, but the comment was directed at Stiles. “Magic keeping you up at night?”

“Something anyway,” Stiles said. “Hey, uh, you’re taller than I expected.”

Laura raised her eyebrows. 

“Well last time I saw you, you were uh-” He looked like he wanted to crawl under the ground. “A teeny bit chopped in half.”

“How are you here?” Derek snapped. Laura seemed different from the other two, far more fixed and solid. They had smelled like they weren’t entirely there, like an echo of themselves. She just looked and smelled exactly like she always had. Like his Alpha. The familiarity of it gave him a kind of cognitive dissonance, because Scott was right there, and Scot was his real Alpha, nowadays.

“I’ve been hanging around,” she said with a shrug. “It happens when you are violently murdered. But the others- that’s different. They were brought here, and trapped here. None of us can leave.” 

“My mom, and Lucy’s mom?” Stiles asked. Laura nodded. Derek just stared at the lines of her face, her nose and mouth, the way she was moving, shifting, palpable.

“Wait a second. Your _mom_ ,” Scott said, sounding horrified. “Dude, that’s rough.”

“Is that Derek’s sister?” Kira whispered. She was standing arm in arm with Allison, who had a hard look on her face. 

Laura sighed and stamped around in a wide circle, the way she always used to do when she was really irritated. In New York they’d stayed in a Brooklyn apartment barely big enough for both of them, and Laura had always been bouncing off the walls. 

“This pack is so ridiculous,” she said under her breath. She looked over at Scott. “You-” she said, pointing. “You’re the Alpha. Did you know he wasn’t sleeping?” her pointed finger swung round to Stiles, who flinched back. 

“Yeah,” Scott said, a little defensive. “Why?”

“Because,” Laura waved a hand at the clearing. “Because the reason Stiles isn’t sleeping is the same reason all the other ghosts are coming back, it’s because there’s a necromancer in town.”

 

\---

 

A figure draped in dark robes drew the souls from living sacrifices and forged them into a many-faced demon. The blood of a hundred victims flowed down into a ritual circle and opened a doorway into the afterlife. For some reason, a man was getting his genitals cut off. Derek couldn’t actually read the latin in the book Lydia was flicking through, but the pictures told enough of the story on their own. 

“Here, here,” Lydia said. “I haven’t got around to typing up this chapter, that’s probably why I didn’t recognize it.” Laura was leaning over Derek’s shoulder. She wasn’t exactly corporeal, but she smelled like she was, like oil from her bike, and like their apartment and cigarettes and fruity shampoo. The smell was competing with the stink of magic because Stiles had summoned balls of light that were hovering around their little circle. Derek didn’t know how to feel. His mind was like a tangle of everything all at once.

“A Necromancer,” Lydia translated. “The foulest of all magicians, the necromancer controls the arts of death,” she muttered under her breath for a moment, then corrected herself. “I mean, ‘the necromancer _practices_ the arts of death.’ There’s a lot of stuff here. I need to take this away and do it somewhere where my shoes won’t get ruined.”

She glanced over at Laura. “No offense. I know you can’t come with us.”

Derek realized that Stiles was not paying attention any more. He was walking around the clearing, stopping at random places and waving his hand around. Then he crouched down and pressed his ear to the wet grass.

“What is he doing?” Isaac whispered. 

“Stiles what are you doing?” Scott called over. Stiles didn’t answer, but Derek smelled the tang of magic get stronger, and saw him reach through the earth like it was water. He was pulling on something, hand over hand like it was invisible rope. Laura jerked forward a few steps, and Derek caught sight of something, a flicker of sparks along a chain, starting at her chest, and ending where Stiles was crouching.

“I think I figured out why you can’t leave,” Stiles said. Laura was looking at her chest, frowning. “There’s a lot of ghosts here,” Stiles added, when they walked over. He was crouching by a little patch of bare earth, barely palm sized.

“Why can’t we see them?” Kira asked. “You know, with the potion.”

Stiles pointed directly down. “I think they’re under here. I can feel them. Did you come from down there?” He asked Laura. She shrugged.

“I’m just going to try something,” Stiles said, then his eyes flashed gold and he yanked his arms violently apart. There was a crack, like shattering glass, and suddenly Derek could see it- a chain of glittering links, starting at Laura’s chest and disappearing down into the earth. Stiles had broken it, snapped it in two, and the links began to dissolve, melting into particles of magic, threads disappearing into the air. It didn’t smell like Stiles’ magic, and it didn’t have the same white-gold hue. It was darker, colder. The chain unraveled right up to Laura’s chest and she flickered, like static on a TV screen.

Sudden, painful fear lanced straight through Derek. It was panic at the idea of Laura disappearing again. He hadn’t realized quite how glad he was to see her again, how an empty part of him had felt temporarily complete again.

“Laura,” he said hoarsely, reaching out towards her, but Scott held him back with one palm on his forearm. One, frightening breath later Laura coalesced again, solid and real like she was really there.

“Wait, I feel- different,” she said. “What the hell did you do Stilinski?”

“I’m pretty sure you can leave now,” Stiles said. He sounded tired. “So hey, let’s go somewhere. I’m cold. I’m hungry. I want a burger.”

 

\---

 

Joe’s closed at ten, so they went to the diner on 14th street. There were far too many of them to sit in one booth, even with Lydia bowing out so that she could go home and moisturize. Derek got the feeling that what she meant by moisturize was _spend 3 hours translating the chapter on necromancers_. Allison, Kira and Isaac took a booth of their own, and Scott sat beside Derek. Stiles left a space for Laura, and apparently she wasn’t that ghostly, because she sat down next to him and braced her elbows on the table.

“I can touch some things,” she said, when she saw Derek looking. 

“Trying to get this all straight in my head,” Stiles said. “First weird thing, Grave robbery. Then the hauntings started. Then the blood was stolen.”

“Maybe you’re looking at it out of order,” Scott said. “We only figured out that there were ghosts about when they started haunting Derek. Maybe it started before that?”

“I want the big dirty,” Stiles said, out of the blue, because the waitress had appeared at the table.“And curly fries.”

The waitress scribbled it down and turned to Scott and Derek with her eyebrows raised. Derek wasn’t even sure what he ordered. A coffee, or something. He was still seizing up over the way Stiles’ mouth looked when he said _big dirty_. Over the table, Laura gave him a look. 

“You sure you’re not hungry?” Stiles asked Derek. “I’m not letting you have any of mine, dude. I know what you werewolves are like.”

“Tell me about the nightmares,” Laura said. Again, the question was directed at Stiles, who grimaced.

“Can I not get my burger first? Fine. So I’m dreaming that I’m stuck in a coffin, it’s pitch black and I scratch and scratch at the wood but I can’t get out. And there’s this, rhyme stuck in my head, over and over. Total fucking ear worm. It goes; _One, a flock of weary souls, two an earthless metal, three the dust of ancient bones, four atropa’s petal, five the blood of forty men and six a stolen soul, the seventh a beating heart put still, to make the ritual whole._ ”

“Creepy,” Isaac supplied over the top of the booth. Derek just felt furious. 

“Any particular reason why you didn’t mention this before now?” he said slowly. Stiles looked at his hands; the back of them first, then flipped them over to look at his palm. His fingertips were marked with healing pinpricks.

“I told Scott,” he said quietly. “I was going to tell you but I knew you’d be mad.”

“You’re damn right I’m mad,” Derek said. “I thought this was better. You told me the tattoo was working!”

Stiles scowled and picked up a napkin, folding and fiddling with it and generally doing anything apart from looking at Derek or answering. 

“The tattoo did work, this is different. But weirdly, I knew you’d get all asshole snappy and think it was your fault somehow, because you’re a big old martyr with eyebrows, so I decided not to tell you,” Stiles grumbled. Laura burst into laughter, just as the drinks arrived.

“He’s got you pegged bro,” she said. 

 

\---

 

They ate, talked circles around the whole necromancer thing, and then parted ways. Most of them anyway. Laura went with Derek in his car. After two blocks he realized Stiles was following in the jeep.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Derek said, glaring into the rear view mirror. 

“He probably wants to apologize,” Laura said. “You should just let him. I know you find it embarrassing, but sometimes you just have to do it.”

There it was, the thing Derek missed the most about his sister. She had his number, she knew him better than anyone else, and she never let him forget it. It was cruel that she would probably have to leave him again, when this was all over. 

“I’ll be up there,” Laura said when they pulled up in front of the loft, and melted into the shadows. Stiles parked up behind and jumped out of the jeep. Derek could always smell him better when they were having an argument, like his senses were conspiring with Stiles to piss him off even more.

“Yo,” Stiles said, sliding into the passenger side. He sat there for a bit. “Hey, I wanted to say thanks for taking me for breakfast today. I needed it." 

Derek had killed the engine, it was way past midnight and very quiet. This part of town was still more abandoned-industrial than anything else, so there wasn’t much traffic, or people at all. Stiles’ heartbeat was the only other one for blocks, and it sounded deafening at that moment. After a minute of silence, the lights went out in the car, and the only light came from a street lamp across the road. It picked out Stiles’ profile delicately, catching on his messy hair and the soft curve of his bottom lip.

“Sorry,” he added. “For lying about the nightmares. I probably should have told you first.”

“Why?” Derek said. “Why first? I mean, Scott’s your best friend, and he’s the Alpha.” It was a question for himself more than Stiles really.

Stiles didn’t answer straight away, just sat very still. Then he said, quietly, evenly, “You know why.”

He reached over and touched Derek on his cheek, just below his eye. It was a familiar, strange gesture, something that felt far more intimate than it should. Derek wanted to blame magic for the way it felt, for the full body shiver that it gave him, but Stiles’ eyes were their normal shade of brown, and the air smelled of nothing but him. After a heartbeat, he withdrew his hand and climbed out of the car. Derek waited until he was two blocks away in the jeep, until his heartbeat faded out of hearing range, and then he went back up to the loft.

 

\---

 

The next morning, Derek found Laura sitting on the counter in his kitchen staring at the coffee maker. In daylight she looked far less substantial, like the light passed through her strangely. It was probably something to do with the potion wearing off. Derek was so relieved that she was still there, and it hadn’t all been a dream, that he didn’t care.

“I miss coffee,” she said, gloomily. “Did you sleep well?”

He had not slept well, not even under the very generous definition of the phrase that Stiles liked to employ. He’d spent the night tossing and turning, stumbling from one feverish nightmare to another. Instead of answering Derek just made a noise that he felt expressed that sentiment sufficiently. 

“You have a lot of text messages,” Laura said. “I think Stiles went home and mainlined a few red bulls.”

Derek put a pot of coffee on before he went anywhere near his phone. Laura moved about the loft as he did, testing things, seeing if she could pick them up, trying out his furniture. She’d lost her leather jacket at some point, and was just in his old grey T-shirt, and it was so familiar it hurt. Two years of chaos later, this was perhaps the first chance he had been given just to miss her. 

“Sorry,” she said, “This is probably really hard for you. Much harder than it is for me. I’ve been around, watching everything go down. This must be kind of a shock for you.”

“I’ll get over it,” Derek said, and picked up his phone while he waited for the coffee. The first message was time-stamped at four am. There were four more after that.

 

_had a thought flock of weary souls is probably the ghosts right_

 

_obviously blood and bones are there and atropa’s petal is probably deadly nightshade but stumped on earthless metal_

 

_bit concerned about the last two sounds a bit murdery_

 

_Is laura still there?? can u ask her if she remembers anything_

 

_DEREK I know ur mad at me but get past it for the good of humanity ty ty ty_

  

Derek put his phone down and poured a coffee. Thinking about Stiles was making his brain hurt, so he decided not to bother. He took the coffee out to the lounge area and sat on the sofa with it and looked at the way the light from the windows fell through Laura and was changed and refocused, like it was passing through a prism rather than a person.

“What did Stiles want?” She asked, perched cross legged on one of the recliners. It was weird that she knew Stiles. Derek had often wondered what she would have made of his adopted pack. It made an odd kind of sense that she seemed to like Stiles the best. They were similar in all the ways that irritated Derek the most.

“He wants to know if you remember anything,” Derek said. “Do you?”

Instead of answering right away, Laura sighed and fussed about, pulling her hair back from her face and tying in a ponytail. Derek wondered where she got the hair tie from, but then she’d always had them everywhere when she was alive, tucked in every pocket, for when she got fed up of her mane of hair falling in her eyes.

“After Peter- when it first happened, it was just like chaos. I don’t know if that happens to everyone, it’s like you lose your shape. I suppose most people just fade away,” Laura rubbed her face. Her movement didn’t make any noise at all, which was unsettling. “I’m not the fading away sort. I came back to myself, I don’t really know the timescale. Time is different when you’re dead.”

“I watched,” she said. “ Although that isn’t the right way of describing it. It wasn’t really in a linear fashion. I think it’s more like, I know what happened, less like I was standing there watching it. And then suddenly, everything was linear again. I was in the dark, by the stone. I couldn’t escape it. The furthest I managed was to your loft, once, before I was dragged back.”

Derek looked down at his coffee and pursed his lips. Like he always did, he compared himself to Laura and wondered what he would have done if he had been left alone in the dark for that long, watching everything and unable to act.

“Hey, it’s not that bad,” Laura said. “I mean, I wasn’t really aware of the passing of time. It sounds worse than it is.”

Derek couldn’t hear her heartbeat, obviously, but he knew she was lying, just from the forced air in her voice and the way she was smiling. Laura had always had a habit of lying to Derek to spare his feelings.

“I’ll just text him and say no then,” Derek said, getting up to grab his cell. Since he’d last checked it, he had three more messages. The first was from Scott.   
  


_Lydia found something, I’m at target with mom we’ll come to urs after I’m done_

 

The other two were from Stiles.

 

_Would it make u feel better if I said last night I didnt have a nightmare???_

_Because I didn’t I had a very nice dream about you_

 

_by you of course I mean your dick_

 

Derek glared at his cellphone.  

“Oh my god, I love what is happening to your face right now,” Laura said. 

Derek decided to make his reply simple and Stiles could just guess what it was in reference to.

 

_No._

 

\---

 

Scott wouldn’t stop staring at Laura. Derek noticed it straight away, when Scott turned up at the loft with Lydia and Kira in tow, a box of doughnuts and a tray of coffee cups. He kept missing the hole in the lid of his cup and spilling the coffee on his shirt, because he was too busy staring at Laura to check whether he had it facing the right way. She noticed too.

“What’s the problem McCall?” she said. “You keep staring at me like that and I’ll have to start charging you.”

Scott shook his head and smiled apologetically. Derek had noticed how much calmer he was these days. He was far less likely to get flustered or worked up. He’d never had much of a temper, for an Alpha werewolf, and Derek had thought that was a weakness once upon a time. Now he knew it was a strength.

“I guess it’s just cool to meet you. You’re kind of the reason I’m a werewolf,” Scott said, rubbing at his neck.

Derek had not heard the story in its entirety, only in bits and pieces here and there. He knew that Stiles blamed himself for the whole thing, which was absurd, because Derek got the feeling that they would have all got tangled up in it anyway, the moment Allison Argent popped up in town. 

“I know,” Laura said, leaning back and propping herself up with her arms. She was sitting cross-legged at one end of the table while Lydia flicked through her spell books at the other. “Well done me, you make a good werewolf.”

“This is all very nice,” Lydia muttered, still flicking through pages. “But you’re not going to be so chipper about the whole thing when I show you what I found last night.” She flipped open one of the books and spun it around. The writing was in latin, which was unhelpful, and most of one of the pages was taken up with an elaborate glyph, circular and superficially similar to the one Stiles was wearing on his back. 

“Cliff notes,” Lydia said, waving her hand at Scott when he opened his mouth to say something. “Very nasty horrible spell for raising someone from the dead so they can be your undead slave for all eternity. Key points to note; ritual has seven steps.”

“Like the rhyme,” Laura said, sounding intrigued. She reached for the book then stopped when her fingers slid through the yellowing pages. “Oh for f- okay Lydia keep going.” 

Lydia raised both eyebrows, and there was a bit of a staring competition, then she turned the book back around and began to translate.

“ _To succeed in this ritual takes a lifetime of preparation. Only once the necromancer has achieved mastery of his art can he attempt it. Failure in the ritual surely will mean death._ It goes on and on, for like ten pages, about how dangerous it is and all the people who attempted it and died, but doesn’t say how to do it. Only that there are seven steps and this glyph is required.”

She traced the edges of the shape with the tip of one red fingernail, and the noise of it dragging on parchment made Scott and Derek share a wince.

“Well whoever the necromancer is, they’re pretty close to finishing if they’re at the “blood of forty men” bit,” Laura said. She looked at Scott, who was looking at the glyph with his own particular type of focused determination.

“We have to stop them,” Scott said. “Stiles’ rhyme said something about a beating heart gone still right? That’s murder.” He looked up, and Derek wondered if Laura felt it too, that unmistakeable pull he had. Scott was a natural born leader. “We have to stop it.”

“I’m going round to Allison’s,” Lydia said. “Her dad was making noises about someone defeating a necromancer once or something. I’ll text you,” she said. That was directed at Scott, who nodded.

“I’m going to head back out to the preserve,” he said. “I want to see if I can smell anything familiar,” he glanced over at Laura. “Want to come? You might remember something?”  


“Sure,” she said, and slid off the table.

“What do you want me to do?” Derek asked, as Lydia headed out, heels clacking on the wood floorboards. 

Scott gave him a measuring kind of look before he said, “Can you go check on Stiles? I called him this morning and he was ranting about some guy on Craigslist and it sounded like he’d taken two too many adderall and was on a research bender.” Scott grimaced, “Don’t look at me like that, dude, you’re like the Stiles-whisperer.” 

Laura snorted and Derek decided he’d had enough anyway. He left without even bothering to make a show of complaining about it. 

 

\---

 

Stiles had taken two too many adderall and was on a research bender. The front door was locked and the cruiser was missing from the driveway so Derek had to resort to old tactics and vault up to Stiles’ window. He found him face down on his laptop, pressing the space bar with his cheek and filling up a word document with empty pages. He was out for the count. Derek thought about waking him up, finding out what progress he had made, heading out to do some digging, but he was tired and the idea was unappealing. 

They were fighting right now. That always made them cruel to each other, and Derek didn’t feel like being cruel. He didn’t want to see the sarcastic curl of Stiles’ mouth and he didn’t want to lose his temper and say something sharp and aimed right at one of Stiles’ soft, targets, like his mom, or the nogitsune, or a hundred other things. Derek didn’t trust himself not to do that. So instead, he lifted Stiles up from where he was curled over his laptop and let him slump back against the pillows and the rolled up bulk of his comforter. He shoved all the books and paper print-outs onto the messy floor and stretched out himself, beside Stiles on the bed. The bed was big enough that they weren’t touching, and messy enough that Derek didn’t feel so bad about leaving his boots on. He closed his eyes, just for a minute.

 

\---

 

When he opened them again, the sun had moved and was shining in through the window. It wasn’t warm sunlight, just wintry and pale, but it was enough to make Derek blink, and reach for the blinds. He wasn’t in his own bed. 

“Don’t move,” Stiles said, sleepily from the vicinity of Derek’s shoulder. Derek sunk back against the bed. Stiles was on his belly, one arm thrown right across Derek, and face pressed into his shoulder, nose at his throat. His mouth was half open, and every breath he took was a warm shiver across Derek’s skin. It was the middle of the fucking day, so Derek could see each tiny little detail; the flick of Stiles’ eyelashes against his cheek, the slow shift of his fingers on Derek’s belly, the biro scribble on his arm, dots of yellow highlighter on his fingertips.

“I can feel you angsting,” Stiles said, sounding a little more awake. “Can you hold off a bit so I can enjoy this awesome nap thing we have going on?”

Derek sighed, then made an effort to shove thoughts out of his head. Instead he raised his hand and stroked it through the hair on the back of Stile’s head, an aimless movement with nothing behind it other than the impulse he had to just _touch_.

Stiles yawned. His knee nudged up against the side of Derek’s leg, but otherwise he was still and calm, his back rising and falling with each slow, easy breath.

“You smell really nice,” Stiles mumbled, after some time had passed. “Is that weird?”

“Not really,” Derek said, still carding his fingers through Stiles’ hair. He didn’t think, just kept talking, letting the words rumble in his chest. “You smell nice as well.”

Stiles sighed, like that made him happy. He moved his face, rubbing his nose along Derek’s jaw and the atmosphere changed. Derek felt a kind of giddy arousal, like white noise in the background, the buzzing anticipation of _something_ , competing in his head against all those reasons why it was a really bad idea to indulge in this Stiles Stilinski problem he had.

“Hey,” Derek said softly, because Stiles was a bit more restless. “Sit up.”

The white noise was winning. Stiles pushed himself up, sleepily and smiled down at Derek. He had a crease on his face from Derek’s shirt and his eyes were hooded and secretive.

“Take off your shirt,” Derek murmured, dropping his hand down to curl at the hem and tug it gently up. Stiles didn’t say anything, just took off his T-shirt, soft and pliant and easy. His chest was pale but not hairless, marked everywhere with scattered moles. Derek sat up a little more and touched him carefully with his fingertips, learning the shape of his body now that it wasn’t hidden under five layers of too-large clothing.

“Derek,” Stiles said, leaning forward. Their foreheads pressed together, then their noses softly, and then their lips softer than that. The kiss felt easier than Derek had expected, a natural confluence. Their lips parted, and he tasted the soft heat inside Stiles’ mouth. He pulled away and looked at Stiles’ smile, close up.

“Turn around for a minute?” Derek asked, and Stiles did. The tattoo was very dark against his skin and very clear in the daylight. Derek leaned forward and kissed it, parted his lips at the very heart of it, the tightly spiraling, coiling centre, where he had made the last few, shaky marks. Stiles had been shivering under him then, and he shivered again, moaned and hunched his shoulders, arching his back.

“Ah shit, Derek-” he began before another moan. “You are just so, completely, ugh.” 

“Completely ugh?” Derek asked, making sure he said it in a way that pressed his teeth against Stiles’ skin. That earned him another shudder.

“You are like kryptonite,” Stiles said. “Like my sexy, personal kryptonite- wait-”

“Wait?” Derek said. He jerked back as Stiles turned around, looking panicked.

“What time is it?” Stiles lunched over to grab his alarm clock then swore and tossed it on the floor. Just like that all his easy pliancy and soft-eyed arousal was gone, and he was back to being a mile-a-minute asshole, kicking off his sweatpants and dragging on a pair of jeans.

“Crap, crap, crap, I’ve got like twenty minutes to get all the way over town,” he said, turning to Derek with his head halfway through a T-shirt. “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry!”

“What the hell?” Derek snapped, mostly irritated because his dick was three pages behind and the sudden change in tone was giving him emotional whiplash. “Where do you even need to be?”

“Kryptonite,” Stiles said, like that was somehow significant. “Fucking _kryptonite_ Derek! Are you going to come?”

Derek went, but he made sure it was clear to Stiles that he was not happy about it.

 

\---

 

‘All the way over town,’ ended up meaning practically in Beacon Heights, all the way out to an apartment block on the north end of a commuter shopping complex and otherwise disparate collection of failing businesses. Derek appreciated that to most people, Beacon Hills was the boondocks in comparison to whatever metropolis they stayed in, but this place was actually genuinely isolated, in that sad urban sprawl sense of the word. There was like ten miles of highway between it and anywhere meaningful, and none of that countryside.

“Are you still grumpy?” Stiles asked while they stood outside the apartment block waiting for the door. Derek didn’t want to answer, so he just glared at Stiles and stood a little farther away from him than he normally would. Stiles frowned. “Use words, Derek.”

“Yes,” Derek said finally. “The impression you gave me earlier was that you wanted to have sex with me. Then you interrupted just as we were getting started, to make me drive you miles out of town and buy you a McDonalds. I’m still grumpy.”

“I definitely want to have sex with you,” Stiles said, hammering the buzzer for apartment 4A a few more times. “I want to have lots of sex with you in a variety of positions, I actually made a list of sexy things to do with you. It’s like, three pages long. But I made this appointment last night, and the guy is kind of skittish, so I didn’t want to miss it. I’ll pay you back for the McDonalds.”

“Maybe I don’t want to have sex with you anymore,” Derek grumbled, as the door finally buzzed open. Stiles just raised an eyebrow at that, which was- a fair point actually.They had to take the stairs to the fourth floor, and when they got there the door to apartment 4A was cracked open and a man was peering out. He was pale, like he didn’t see much sun, and much of his face was obscured by his mess of hair, and enormous beard. 

“Are you Stiles?” the man said, so quietly he almost wasn’t audible. His eyes flickered to the side, glancing at his neighbor’s doors. “Who did you bring?”

“My colleague,” Stiles said. “Remember I told you I was working with a partner? He’s cool, I can vouch for him. Derek, this is Ben, Ben, this is Derek.”

The man frowned, then disappeared. The door closed and Derek heard the jangle of chains being released, then it opened fully, and Ben gestured for them to come in. Inside, the apartment smelled strongly of bleach. It was small, with low ceilings and a narrow hallway. The walls were bare and white, the floor was plain vinyl. As Ben led them through, he was wringing his hands.

The apartment lounge was bizarre. There was next to no furniture, just a desk and chair and an ancient sofa. Most of the space was taken up by stacks and stacks of neatly organized paperwork. It was stacked precisely, in manila folders, with every page lined up. Derek could see how the files at the bottom had been compressed by the weight of those above. Ben had been collecting for a while.

“Can you really help me get it back?” he said, sitting down at the desk and twisting his fingers together.

“Hopefully,” Stiles said, “No promises though Ben, we could be dealing with some difficult stuff here.”

Derek didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on, but he decided that the best course was to sit beside Stiles on the sofa and look threatening. Ben kept throwing him glances, and Derek could smell the fear on him, sour and unappealing. 

“Tell me again, from the start, what happened,” Stiles said. Ben hunched into the seat and then nodded, like he was allowing himself to share.

“I keep it in the box room, it’s locked up there and I have a camera at the door, plus another one out at the parking lot, and one on the hall. I have an alarm, it’s set every night at ten. It went off at 2am and woke me up. I went straight through but -” Ben’s voice had been increasing in pitch as he went along, and Derek smelled the panic on him. “It was already gone!”

“Do you have a picture of it?” Stiles asked, and Ben nodded, going to the nearest stack of paperwork and thumbing down until he withdrew a file folder, flipping it open. The front was marked with an elaborate reference code, penned with an uber-neat hand.

The picture inside was of a piece of rock. It was placed next to a ruler, which indicated that it was 6 inches across, and was otherwise rather unremarkable. It was pitted grey, darker in some places and speckled with metallic flecks. Stiles made a pleased sort of nose as he peered down at the picture. 

“Remarkable,” he said, and Derek listened to his heart rabbiting away in his chest. “A wonderful specimen.”

“I know right?” Ben snatched it back. “I got it from a guy on the internet, but I just knew, I _knew_ that they would take it back. They couldn’t have anyone knowing, you know that.”  

“I know,” Stiles said, darkly. He was lying through his teeth. His heart had barely been beating that hard when Derek had been making out with him before. You wouldn’t know it to look at his face, which was serious, professional.

“I got the bastard though,” Ben spat. “I got him on the camera. I can show you his face.”

“Please,” Stiles said, and maybe it was just the way he was arranging his face, the posture he had, but he looked older. Ben climbed out of his chair and it wasn’t until he had gone through into another room that Derek realized that Stiles was using magic, subtle enough that he had barely smelled it. When he glanced back at Derek, the edges of his irises glimmered gold,and the persuasive competence of him rippled, like acetate lying over the top of him.

“Shh,” he said, before Derek could comment. Ben came hurrying back, with a stack of photographs in his hands. Stiles took them and thumbed through them. Derek heard his heartbeat ratchet up, but outwardly he didn’t react.

“I’m sure if I look for him through the usual channels, all I would get is a cover up,” he said mildly. Ben nodded. Stiles nodded. Derek tried not to get even more frustrated about how he didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on.

“I need to take these,” Stiles said, with authority. “The people we are dealing with are dangerous, so I would advise you to be vigilant. Leave it to us,” he nodded back at Derek, and Derek tried to look impressive, squaring his shoulders and making sure his face was neutral.

“How will I contact you?” Ben asked, and Stiles rattled out an email address that Derek didn’t recognize. He stood, and Derek took his cue. He stood as well, trying to look menacing over Stiles’ shoulder. Ben glanced at him wide-eyed.

On the way out, Stiles led, and for a moment, Ben and Derek were standing alone in the hallway. 

“I know what you are,” Ben said, seriously, and Derek felt an old familiar lance of panic. “Project Saturn, right? Government super soldier.”

Derek stared. He guessed that a super soldier would neither confirm nor deny, so he just tried to look grim, and headed out.

“I won’t tell anyone!” Ben called out after him.

 

\---

 

Derek waited until they got to the car before he said anything.

“What the fuck Stiles?” he barked, and Stiles reacted by cackling. He was grinning down at the photographs like they solved everything. 

“Dude, _kryptonite_ ,” Stiles said. “Ben might be kind of a conspiracy nut, but until like five nights ago, he had a pretty cool hunk of meteorite, or as one might refer to it _an earthless metal_.”

“So you think whoever is doing the ritual stole the meteorite.” It was, like most things Stiles-related, unexpectedly clever. Derek hated that. Or he loved it, it was impossible to really tell.

“I think,” Stiles said, sounding extremely, extremely smug, “Whoever is doing the ritual got their _assistant_ to steal the meteorite.” He held up the photograph from the top of the pile. It was a young man, perhaps in his late twenties, thin, with dark hair and a narrow face. Unremarkable. Derek didn’t have a clue who he was.

“Are you kidding me?” Stiles snapped, at his non-reaction. He lunged out of the seat and clambered over until he was contorted into the back seat of the jeep, rummaging around in the stacks and stacks of paper in there. Finally he made a noise of triumph and fell back into his seat, red-faced and holding a crumpled newspaper. 

_New DA Dawson Leads a 2% Rise in Conviction._

Under the headline, there was Mandy Dawson herself, and at her elbow, a very familiar, narrow-faced young man. He was carrying her coat. He was carrying her Starbucks coffee. The photograph was high enough resolution that Derek could see that the box was ticked for an extra shot and hazelnut syrup.

“Right,” Derek said, because Stiles was going to be fucking insufferable now.

 

\---

 

“I don’t know why you didn’t go after her right away,” Laura said, when they were back at the loft, everything they had on Mandy Dawson spread out on the table. “Look at that streak of grey in her hair. She’s like a comic book villain.”

“I know right,” Stiles enthused, smiling down at a headshot they had downloaded from the website of the old law firm she had worked at before she came back to Beacon Hills. Dawson was wearing dark red lipstick and smiling at the camera like she wanted to eat it. 

“I don’t believe it,” Isaac grumbled. “It’s too obvious.”

“You’re just mad I was right, like always,” Stiles said. Isaac glared, like he was about to argue back, until Derek dropped a hand onto his shoulder. Instead he rolled his eyes.

“We can’t just go up to the DA and accuse her of being a necromancer,” Allison said. “I mean, you understand that right? You can’t just do the ‘Derek, Scott and Stiles Show’ here and turn up at the courthouse with a baseball bat.”

Derek did his best not to wince. That one was on the nose. 

“No duh,” Stiles said. “We need to corner her at her house. That must be where she’s doing her freaky-deaky magic stuff.”

“So what- we’re just going to wait outside the courthouse and follow her home?” Lydia said. No-one answered and her face fell. “My god, you’re serious. Well you do that. I’m going to maybe do a bit more research in the hope that I can prevent you all from being kidnapped and ritually sacrificed,” she grabbed her oversized handbag and hurried out of the loft.

“I really like her,” Laura said.

 

\---

 

Mandy Dawson liked to work late. Really, really late. They were camped out half a block from the courthouse secure parking lot and had been since school got out. It was coming up on hour six of the stake-out and Derek was getting seriously bored. The last time Laura had floated out to check, the DA’s car was still in the parking lot- the only one left. What made it all worse was that Stiles was camped out on the other side of the road in Scott’s mom’s car with Scott and Isaac and kept texting Derek pornographic things.

“He really knows how to wind you up,” Laura commented, after something like the eighth text message. Derek had taken one look at it and shoved his phone in the glove compartment, like that would help somehow. “I mean it in a good way bro. He pushes all your buttons.”

“It wasn’t always like that,” Derek grumbled, which was a shocking lie. Stiles had always, _always_ pushed his buttons. It was just a slightly different set of buttons nowadays. Laura glanced at him sideways, gave him a _look_.

“You seem pretty conflicted,” Laura said. “Is it the age thing?”

“He’s Stiles,” Derek said, unable to explain in any other way. “He’s seventeen, his dad is the Sheriff, he’s leaving for college, he’s immature, he’s irritating, he’s hyperactive, he’s still grieving - the list of reasons why it’s a bad idea is so long Dawson will probably be out the office before I’m done. Conflicted isn’t the word. It’s more like a epic struggle between my dick and all rational thought. Ah, fuck.”  
  
Derek scrubbed at his face and left his hand over his mouth, hoping that it would stop any more of his frustrated anxiety from pouring out. He remembered the smell of Stiles, warm and sleepy, the softness of his skin beneath Derek’s lips, the taste of him. The easy, filthy heat of his mouth.

Laura reached out, and Derek felt her for a moment, her hand on the back of his neck like she always used to do when he was stressed. He’d been stressed a lot as a teenager, one of those kids who had an easy-going mask for school and worried himself into ulcers at home. Laura had always helped. Without her, Derek had kind of just become a bundle of raw nerve endings.

“Hey,” she said. “He’s kind of amazing though. I think so anyway.”

Derek couldn’t argue with her, she was right. Stiles was amazing. Maybe that was the point. Inside the glove compartment his phone buzzed, and Derek sighed. He pulled it out. Stiles again.

 

_HOLLA The package is on the move!!!_

 

When Derek glanced over at the parking lot, Dawson’s Mercedes was pulling out from behind the security barrier and turning left down the road. She was behind the wheel, and her assistant was with her. Derek waited until she was more than a block away and then fired up the engine and followed her.    
  


\---

 

It wasn’t until they turned onto the highway, out past the preserve that Derek began to think something was wrong.  

“Did they build houses out here?” Laura asked. Up ahead, Scott was driving too close to the center line, but there wasn’t much traffic so it wasn’t a huge deal. Dawson’s Mercedes was only just visible, just a pair of tail lights in the dark. 

“No,” Derek said, uneasiness creeping up inside him. He reached for his cellphone and dialled Stiles, putting him on speaker.

“Yo hot sauce,” Stiles said when he answered. Laura snorted. “Are you getting the creeping suspicion that we’ve been clocked too?”

“Why would they be driving all the way out here?” Derek said. This stretch of highway went down the back of the preserve and right out to the next town to the north. There was pretty much nothing but forest. Derek sometimes ran there, but not often, because the ground was rocky and uneven and smelled like abandoned industry, burnt metal and smoke.

“Oh probably to confront and ritually sacrifice us,” Stiles said, not sounding particularly bothered. “I guess Lydia was right.”

“I think you should call her, and the Argents,” Derek said, because assholes or not, Chris and Allison were the best equipped in town to help them out if things went south. “Then your dad.”

“Chill dude,” Stiles began, but before he could continue there was a crackle of static and the call cut out.

“No bars?” Laura said, trying to reach for the phone, then grimacing when her hand passed right through it. “Watch, they’re turning up ahead.”

She was right. Against all logic or common sense, Scott had turned up a dirt track, leading into the preserve. Dawson must have gone up there. Derek had no choice but to go in after him. He swore.

“Baby Argent was right about you guys,” Laura whispered, as Derek followed. “You do love to just wing it.”

The track ran for half a mile, and when they reached the end of it, they found Dawson’s Mercedes, abandoned with the key still in the ignition. The air stank of magic, the same brittle, alien smell from the clearing up where the old Warren house had once stood. This was the magic that had trapped Laura and all the other ghosts, and the same magic that had exploded the blood donor van and the Warren grave. This was definitely the necromancer.

“I feel like there are some pieces that we haven’t quite put together,” Stiles said, wandering around the car. He stopped by the driver’s seat.“I mean, there’s blood on the steering wheel.” He reached in and took the keys. 

“Why would there be blood?” Isaac asked, peering into the car. Dawson’s coat and briefcase were on the back seat. “Aren’t they working together?”

“Or maybe the assistant is about to become a human sacrifice,” Scott said. He had found a rough path, and when Derek got closer he could smell more blood, drops of it on the ground, heading off into the forest. For a moment, they all stood in silence, staring down the path, and then Stiles’ cell began to buzz and he leapt about a foot in the air.

“Aww shit, I was sure I had no bars,” he said, and Derek listened to his heart thudding in his chest, quick with panic. “It’s Lydia. Hey gorgeous, what’s the story?”

He held the phone out and they gathered around, three werewolves, a sorcerer and a ghost. 

“Thought you should know something I found out about Caleb Warren,” Lydia said. Her voice was indistinct, fading in and out as she spoke. “You probably know the basics right- funded a whole pile of coal mines, founded the town, etcetera. Well apparently he was a big time occultist too. He was arrested for attempted murder of his wife, and it says he was trying to sacrifice her for some spell. Died before he could be convicted though. So maybe Dawson is related to Warren in some way?" 

“That is- quite helpful?” Stiles said, glancing around, looking unsure. “Look we’re up the back of the preserve, Dawson’s driven up here and it looks like she might have kidnapped her assistant and is planning to like, murder him. Any tips?”

Lydia was silent for a while. Derek read into that how stupid she thought they all were.

“Where up the back of the preserve?” she said, but Derek could hear the same hiss and crackle of static that had heralded the end of Stiles’ call. Before they could say anything else, she was cut off.

“Super,” Stiles said, shoving his cell back in his pocket. “Okay, here’s my suggestion for a plan. We follow the blood trail, find evil DA Dawson and punch her really hard in the face. Then we tie her up, throw her in the back of the car and go from there.”

Stiles sounded confident, he sounded kind of flippant, but he was terrified. Derek didn’t think, he just reached out and grabbed his wrist and squeezed, held him still, kept him from vibrating right out of his skin. Stiles didn’t really react outwardly, but Derek heard his heart calm down. 

“Um,” Isaac said, then turned to Scott. Scott was staring into space, doing that thing he did, where all the pieces seemed to click together in his head and he figured out what to do. Derek just waited, because he trusted Scott now, he knew that he would come up with something.

Then, through the trees, someone screamed, blood-curdling and shrill with fear.

“Shit, fuck - whatever- Stiles’ plan sounds great, let’s go,” Scott said, and that was it, they were running into the forest, following the trail of blood, and the sudden stink of magic.

 

\---

 

The path ended by a rock face, and the entrance to an abandoned coal mine. It must have been sealed off with a padlocked grate, but someone had torn it from its hinges and hurled it across the clearing. The smell of magic and terror was strong enough to make Derek’s eyes water.

“This place feels familiar,” Laura said, reaching out and waving an incorporeal hand through the cliff face. Stiles touched it, pressed his ear against it, and his eyes flickered gold. His breath was condensing in the cold air, he was still wearing Derek’s jacket. He looked up. 

“Hmm,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. The blood trail lead into the mine, and Stiles gestured, summoned a little globe of golden fire to light their way. When it passed Laura it shone through her, catching on shapes inside her, picking up the edges of a ghostly skeleton. Derek looked away.

“Smells really bad down there,” Isaac said, tightly. It didn’t stop him from following Scott in. 

The scent of magic grew thicker quickly, and even as the passage split and meandered its way underground it was easy to know where to go. They just followed the trail of blood and death. The floor was uneven, and Derek walked behind Stiles, watching him stumble over the damp stone. After a bit, he reached out and took his hand, steadied him in the darkness. No-one said anything, they just kept walking.

Finally, after what felt like forever, they heard the sound of a voice up ahead. They must have been half a mile into the ground, and Derek’s senses felt numbed by how much rock and iron was surrounding him. The air was still and stagnant. Scott stopped and waved his hand at Stiles’s light source. Derek felt the magic running across his skin like static when he dismissed it.  

Someone was talking up ahead. The rock walls distorted the voice, but Derek could pick enough to hear that it sounded like a chant.

“Take this gift oh lord of death, claim this soul as yours. Take this gift oh lord of death, claim this soul as yours,” the same phrase repeated over and over. The sound of it made Derek feel strange, lightheaded. Beside him, Stiles flinched and swore, and Derek realized all of a sudden that his claws were out and pressing into the soft skin of Stiles’ palm.

 “You okay?” Stiles whispered. Derek shook his head, but it was dark, Stiles couldn’t see.

Silently, they crept forward. The passage widened until it opened up into an enormous space. It was a huge cavern, so large that Derek couldn’t see the ceiling or the opposite wall. It was a space swallowed up in darkness. Right at the centre there stood a stone column, different from the rock of the floor and walls. It was black and glossy, like obsidian, some kind of volcanic shard. Beside it someone had laid out a circle of braziers. Inside the circle, painted neatly on the floor in human blood was the sigil Lydia had shown them. Firelight flickered on Ben’s hunk of meteorite placed at the centre of it, and lying beside that was Mandy Dawson. She was unconscious, her body arranged neatly, with her hands folded on her chest and a bunch of pink flowers clasped between them. Blood was running from her nose and right beside her on the ground, lay a tangle of greying bones and hollow-eyed skulls.

“I thought I smelled wet dog,” her assistant said, stepping out of the shadows. He looked painfully ordinary, just a plain looking man in grey slacks and a blue shirt. He’d taken off his tie, rolled up his sleeves, and his hands were covered in blood. “I knew there were werewolves about, but I thought you’d know better than to poke your muzzles where they weren’t wanted.”

“We’re not going to let you murder her,” Scott said, and his voice was clear and calm. It filled up the cavern. The necromancer’s eyebrows rose.

“Woof woof,” he said. “The littlest one is the alpha? That’s a new one. Sorry, I’m going to ignore you. Three generations of my family have been preparing this ritual. I’m not going to stop just because a puppy with the weakest pack on the whole western seaboard asked me to.”

He waved a hand, and Derek lunged forward too late. Scott went flying across the cavern and smacked against the wall with a crack. Not fatal, but enough to slow him down. Isaac had already rushed forward, claws out,  and the necromancer laughed, lifted up his hand. Isaac jerked to a stop and then rose in the air, legs kicking, breath choking in his throat. 

“Stop!” Derek barked, but the necromancer wasn’t listening. He hurled Isaac too, in the opposite direction, tumbling until he landed slumped by a heap of loose stone. Derek looked over to Stiles.

Stiles was not paying attention, and neither was Laura. Both of them were looking up, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Derek tried to see what their were looking at, but he couldn’t see anything, just darkness, nothingness.

“What are you going to do, blue eyes?” The necromancer called. He shook his fingers, and between them a knife formed, wicked sharp with a cruel, curved blade. It caught the firelight in an unnatural way, gathering it and keeping it there. “You can watch if you like. When I bring back my ancestor, yours can be the first soul he consumes.”

“Can you hold them back?” Stiles said to Laura, and Derek didn’t have a fucking clue what he was talking about. The necromancer had turned back to his ritual circle, and resumed his chant. The air grew thick and the fire in the braziers began to change color.

“I can try,” Laura said, and just like that she was gone, melting into the darkness. Stiles seemed to snap out of the trance had had been in. He looked at Derek.

“Get Scott, grab Dawson” he said, then he turned towards the ritual circle and shouted, “Oi, butthole! You’re not serious with the whole blood sacrifice thing, right?”

The necromancer didn’t look up, still chanting, ignoring Stiles. Derek knew from experience that that was a pretty stupid thing to do. Ignoring Stiles almost always led to mayhem and destruction of property. He hurried over to Scott, and as he did he smelled Stiles’ magic, sharper than the necromancer, brighter. There was a crash. Stiles had upended all the braziers, spilling hot coals onto the ground. That had got the necromancer’s attention.

“M’okay,” Scott said, pushing up onto his arms. “We need to get her out of here.”

“Yeah no shit,” Derek looked back over at the ritual circle. The necromancer had turned away and was forcing up chunks of the rock floor, trying to trip up Stiles. He was keeping upright, just about, stumbling over the rocks and turning the necromancer away from the circle, luring him back so Scott and Derek could get to Dawson. On the far side of the room, Isaac was getting up too, spitting blood onto the ground.

“Fuck it, go,” Scott said, and they did, sprinting across the cavern towards the ritual circle. The closer they got, the more potent the stink of magic became, and Derek realized he could hear whispers, the sound of hundreds of voices, coming from inside the black pillar. Ghosts. A flock of weary souls, trapped at the _big rock_. This was where they had been waiting, deep in the earth beneath where the Warren house used to stand.

Scott was a few strides ahead of Derek and lunged towards the circle’s edge. Instead of passing inside to where Mandy Dawson lay unconscious, there was a crack like thunder and he was thrown back, hands blackened and smoking. Derek could see it now, the faint glimmering edge of something, a shield around the circle, preventing them from crossing the edge.

“Aww shit shit,” Scott was hunched over his hands, gasping in pain. Derek could feel it, an ache in the bones of the pack. He was hurt badly. Still, he had strength to roar, “Stay back!” when Isaac started to come over. Isaac froze in his tracks.

“Whoops,” the necromancer said, too calm, and the bottom of Derek’s stomach dropped out. He had Stiles by the throat, his hand tightening around his neck, nails digging into his pale skin. Stiles’ sneakers were hanging a foot above the cavern floor. His eyes were brown, not a fleck of gold, not a whisper of magic there. He glanced at Derek, panicked, but something wasn’t quite right about the scene. Derek couldn’t figure out what.

“A pet witch,” The necromancer said, shaking Stiles like a rag doll and dropping him on the ground. He fell just a few scant inches from the edge of the circle, fingers twitching on the damp stone. “How fun. I can borrow some of your power, little mage. You can help me cast my spell.”  


He sucked in a deep breath, and Derek saw magic leave Stiles as a glimmer of gold in the air. Not much, nowhere near as much as Derek knew Stiles had. Stiles’ heartbeat was steady, unafraid. He was faking it.

“Wait,” Derek said, and Scott nodded, clutching his charred hands to his chest. He’d sensed it too. The necromancer drew back and laughed and his eyes flickered gold for a split second.

“Pathetic,” he said, then spread his hands. The air tightened, and Derek felt himself seize up. Even if he had wanted to move, he wouldn’t have been able to. He was frozen on the spot, a helpless spectator. The necromancer began to chant. Some of the words felt heavier in the air than others and he spoke them with a voice that sounded different, just like Stiles did, when he spoke his incantations.

“A flock of weary souls I bring, _consume them_. A fist of earthless metal then, _control them_. Dust of ancient bones I give, _revere them_. Garland of Atropa’s poisoned leaf, _honor them_. Spread out the blood of forty men, _bathe them_. From her, a heart stood still and you your soul, _this ritual made whole_ ,” the words beat out like a rhythm, and the necromancer stepped into the circle, passing through the barrier with barely a ripple. He repeated the chant, walking slowly forward, stepping over Stiles neatly.

On the ground, Stiles was staring at Derek, he tapped his eyelids, eyes flickering gold, and pointed up at the ceiling. Derek looked up.

He could see now, what Stiles and Laura must have seen. Instead of darkness, the cavern ceiling was thick with spirits, hundreds of them, all tethered by the same glowing chains to the column of black rock. At the heart of them was a bright pocket of air, a greedy mouth desperate to consume them, and in front of it, holding the crowds of ghosts back, was Laura.

“I can’t keep this up for long, Stiles,” she shouted, and Derek saw her hands shaking, and the edges of her going threadbare. He tightened the muscles in his shoulders, pushed out his claws and began to flex against the magic holding him in place. 

He watched Stiles, watched him slide his hand out and through the circle barrier. He did it oh so gently, like his hand was passing through water. The necromancer hadn’t noticed, he was still chanting, standing over Mandy Dawson. Stiles crept forward, slid his fingers out, inch by inch and pressed them against the Necromancer’s ankle.

The reaction was instant. The chanting stopped, he froze and gold magic crackled across his skin, like lightning. Stiles leapt to his feet and it wasn’t just his tattoo that was glowing, it was all of him, his skin luminescent in the dark room. The necromancer seized up, floated above the ground, and Derek saw his eyes flickering from side to side, panicked. 

“Sor-cerer,” he managed, from between rigid lips. Still the magic in the room continued to grow, like it had passed beyond his conscious control. Above them Laura was struggling to hold it back, half consumed by the greedy spirit, her hair whipping around her face. She wasn’t going to last much longer. 

Derek looked over to Isaac who was hunched over, eyes glowing amber, fangs bared. He let the howl rumble up from inside him and lunged forward, driving his claws into the barrier around the ritual circle.

It burned furiously, hurt more than anything Derek had ever, ever felt before. It was worse than a thousand volts of electricity, worse than the crippling poison of wolfsbane. It felt like his flesh was melting from his bones, but he pushed through anyway. He pushed through because it was Scott, because it was Stiles, because it was _his sister_.

He curled his fingers around Mandy Dawson’s pale arm and dragged her out, smearing the blood and scattering the belladonna flowers. She was still and cold as she passed through the circle boundary, but as she did it collapsed. The magic shattered into pieces and the burning pain melted abruptly into nothingness. She was alive, a dead weight in Derek’s arms, but alive, and not anyone’s sacrifice. 

“Go!” Scott barked, and Isaac was right there, taking Dawson from Derek and sprinting away with her, scrambling out of the cavern and into the mines. The Necromancer, still paralyzed by Stiles’ magic, made a terrible screeching noise.

“Derek!” Laura screamed, from up above. She was glowing too-bright, and spirits were passing through her, being gobbled up by the light. Too late, Derek realized that her shout was a warning. There was a struggle happening inside the circle, dark magic flickering against gold. Sparks crackled around Stiles and the necromancer, tension drew through the air, and finally snapped with a sound like the crack of a gunshot. Two things happened. 

Stiles shot back in a bolt of bright light, and Derek lunged for the necromancer.With the shield down, it was easy. Derek’s claws sliced through his throat like butter and he dropped, a dead weight onto his own ritual, blood spilling out over the flecked iron of the meteorite, down onto the crushed belladonna flowers.

“Oh no no no,” Scott said, from over beside Stiles. “Derek!"

Derek looked over. Stiles was on his back, hands at his belly, wrapped around the handle of the necromancer’s knife.Derek looked back up at Laura, consumed still by a whirlwind of glowing light. All he could really see was the shape of her eyes, sad like an apology. Like a goodbye.He turned and sprinted over to Scott and Stiles. 

“Hey, hey,” he said, dropping down beside Stiles. He was conscious and the inside of his lips were dark red. His eyes weren’t glowing, and all Derek could smell was his blood. “You can heal it right?”

“Maybe,” Stiles said. “I think-”

“Shhh,” Scott hushed him. “Derek’s going to pull the knife out, but you gotta heal it with your magic okay?”

“Ugh,” Stiles managed. He shook his head, looked at Derek, then nodded, shaky. Derek could see a tear running from the corner of his eye, and smelled his fear. With the fear though, came the smell of magic, faint at first, then stronger, as gold unfurled inside his irises. His skin began to glow, and all the hairs on the back Derek’s arm stood up. He moved Stiles’ hands aside and gripped the knife handle. It was slick with blood.

“Hey,” he whispered, and Stiles just stared at him with gilded eyes. “Heal.”

Derek yanked the knife out, and for the most frightening moment of his life, nothing happened. Then Stiles jerked like he was having a seizure, and shoved both hands over his wound. He glowed gold, brighter and brighter, and shuddered and shook. Scott held him down, Derek tossed the knife aside and pressed his hand over Stiles’ and wished that he had something to give too, some kind of magic of his own. He wished that there was power in how much he _needed_ Stiles to stay alive.

Then it was over. Magic leaked out of Stiles as quickly as it had come, and his head dropped back against the cavern floor. He went limp so quickly, Derek was sure he was dead, until he heard the steady beat of Stiles’ heart, and lifted his hands to find the wound was gone, and all that was left was a bare strip of skin, smooth and unmarked. Derek felt relief so acute it was painful. He dropped his head down to Stiles’ chest, and just breathed. Beside him Scott reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder. For a long few seconds they sat there, and just existed. 

“Uh, something weird is happening,” Scott said, eventually, and Derek sat up. Scott was right. Over by the ritual circle, the braziers had righted themselves, and the air was thick with magic again. The necromancer was still dead, but his body had been rearranged, hands clasping the bloody flowers, floating a foot above the ground. Laura was gone, and the bright, all consuming light above was descending, although it looked different now. Derek couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was familiar, it felt familiar.

“Laura?” he said, hoarse, then stood and approached the circle. The barrier was up again, crackling and vicious. Derek stood and watched.

“We couldn’t stop it?” Scott wondered, still sitting beside Stiles. “I thought killing the necromancer would stop it!” 

“Looks like he became his own sacrifice,” Derek said, pushing out his claws. “The question is, who was he resurrecting?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Scott said. The whispering had gone. Instead Derek heard something else, a distant sound. It was a creaking, like a porch swing. For some reason the sound was soothing rather that frightening. Derek watched the light go into the body of the necromancer, and it begin to glow bright white. Derek felt calm, even as the light grew too bright to look at, even when he had to turn away against the sheer, vital force of the magic. He dropped to his knees and covered his face, and the spell roared around him like a breaker crashing at the beach.

It passed, and Derek uncovered his face. Someone was standing in the ritual circle, panting. He turned around. It was Laura. She was completely naked and her dark hair was in a tangle around her face. Her chest was heaving and she was spattered with blood. Around her the braziers were in embers and the magic was completely gone. The black column of rock was just a column of rock. The blood glyph was just blood on damp stone.It was all over, and Laura was alive. Derek could smell her, could hear her heart thumping in her chest. Her face was wet and he realized she was crying.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said, and it came out like a sob. 

 

\---

 

Derek carried Stiles out, and Laura walked behind him, wearing Scott’s hoodie and Derek’s boots and shivering, still crying. She was in shock, Derek could tell, but Scott had her and was walking along beside her with one hand on her elbow. They had barely made it five minutes down the tunnel before Isaac reappeared with Kira, Allison and her dad, all armed to the teeth.

“Is he-?” Allison said, looking at Stiles. Derek shook his head. Stiles’ heartbeat was a steady promise. 

“Who are you?” Chris demanded, at Laura. Then he looked again. “Laura Hale? Scott what the hell is going on here?”

Scott just shook his head, and there was enough gravity to it that Chris stepped aside, and let them pass. They walked back to the mine entrance in silence. Outside the preserve was lit up with flashing blue lights. The Sheriff was there, with Deputy Parrish, and Derek could see an ambulance. Mandy Dawson was sitting inside, wrapped in a blanket, talking to a paramedic. Everything was about to get really, really messy. 

“Stiles!” The Sheriff jogged over, and Derek gently set Stiles down, let his father take him.  


“He’s okay,” Derek said, and his voice sounded faraway and weird. “He’s not hurt, he just overreached. He’s okay.”

“Okay,” the Sheriff checked a pulse anyway, pushed Stiles’ hair back kind of tenderly and looked up at Derek. “Thanks son, you did a good job today. Thank you.”

Then he saw Laura. Derek could see the cogs turning in his head, two plus two equals _surprise resurrection_ , but before he could say anything, Stiles shifted, and his eyelids fluttered.

“Mom?” he said, and the look on the Sheriff’s face then, well Derek had to turn away, he couldn’t deal with it. He went over to Laura, wrapped her in his jacket. She was shivering, still, and her eyes were fixed on something far away. Derek wanted to take the pain from her, but the hurt wasn’t physical, it was something beyond that.

“You okay?” he said, softly. She shook her head, pushed her fingertips over her mouth and cried, curling into Derek not like she needed comfort, but like she wanted to hide.

“Scott,” the Sheriff called. Stiles was sitting in the cruiser, eyes closed. “How about you and your friends come down to the station and give a statement tomorrow. Seems like we’re kind of busy here at the moment.”

It was an out, and one that they gladly took. 

 

\---

 

Back at the loft, Derek put Laura in the shower, helped her wash off the blood and gave her clean clothes to wear. She slowly began to unwind and all of the tension in her sank away until she was almost normal. They got into bed and Derek just wrapped an arm around her and held her close. They hadn’t been particularly tactile when she was alive, but after the fire, in that awful hotel room the cops had booked them, she had wrapped an arm around Derek, and it had felt like she was holding him together, stopping him from shattering into a thousand pieces. So he did the same.

“I think it was Caleb Warren, the spirit he was trying to bring back,” she said, finally, after a long time lying in silence. “I felt Warren, like this wicked, blackness, and all he wanted was to consume everything. But then after you killed the necromancer-” She shivered. “He disappeared, but by then it was too late, all those spirits were being sucked up, and I was the only one there so-”

She stopped, and shook. She was crying again.

“It was me then. I swallowed them all up. It wasn’t right, it was so, so wrong. But I couldn’t stop it. The necromancer’s will was gone, but the spell was complete so I guess- I guess it just took me instead. Made it into me instead.”

Derek held the back of her head and looked out the window, at the gloomy night sky. He tried to think of a way to express what he felt. 

“Is it wrong that I’m glad?” he whispered. “You’re alive.”

Laura drew in a long, shaky breath, but she seemed calmer.

“You’re alive,” Derek repeated, and he squeezed his eyes shut and forgot about everything else.

 

\---

 

“I always wondered what the hype was about this place,” Laura said, clasping her hands around her gigantor cappuccino. In the light of day, with a twelve hour sleep behind her, she looked much better, bright eyed and calm. She was wedged into the sofa at Joe’s next to Kira, who kept sneaking glances at her.

“Really, really big coffees,” Derek said. He checked his phone again. He hadn’t heard from Stiles or Scott since he’d sent out a text to meet that morning, and he was still waiting for a call back from Cora. He wasn’t entirely sure how to break the news. 

“You’re ultra twitchy,” Laura said, taking a mouthful of her coffee and licking the foam off her lips. “Is Stiles okay?”

“Stiles is okay,” Lydia said, appearing just in time, as always, with a herbal tea in one hand and her massive handbag in the other. She took the seat she always took, which no-one else dared sit in, a squishy armchair big enough for her to curl up on. “His phone is fried, and they took him to the hospital overnight but he’s okay.” She looked over at Derek and shrugged. 

“I ran into his dad when I was getting gas this morning,” she said, by way of explanation. Then she turned to Laura and blinked. “You’re alive,” she said. “Well that’s an unexpected outcome.” 

“You’re telling me,” Laura said. “Is that Scott?”

It was Scott, just about balancing his coffee as he hurried over to the table. Kira shifted up and made space for him. Isaac took his feet off the table so he could put down his coffee. Laura handed him a napkin when he slopped some onto his knee.

“Thanks. Hey, sorry I’m late,” he said. “I had to cycle, Mom needed the car and the bike’s still knackered. Have we decided what we’re going to say to the Sheriff?”

“We were waiting for you,” Derek said. 

 

\---

 

For such an unholy mess it was all cleared up pretty quickly. Mandy Dawson told the Sheriff that her assistant had kidnapped her, put a gun to her head and made her drive him down to the preserve, then knocked her out, smacking her head against her steering wheel. That was it- the next thing she remembered was being dragged out by Isaac. It had been easy enough to spin a tale of do-gooder teenagers and a lack of cellphone reception.No-one mentioned Laura, everything was tied up neatly.

Derek still hadn’t heard from Stiles. Okay - it had only been a few days, and he knew Stiles’ cellphone had been totally destroyed by all the magic shooting about, but still, it felt like he was being avoided. Laura wasn’t sympathetic.

“Just go to his house. Drive up to his house and knock on the door,” she said, the third time she found him staring at his cellphone. She had settled back into being alive rather quickly, and had already filled Derek’s abandoned fruit bowl with a stack of apples and tangerines. “Just get out of here and quit moping, because I’m going to skype Cora and I don’t need your personal thundercloud ruining my afternoon.” 

So Derek went out and drove about and found himself at the cemetery again. It was so cold the air felt sharp and he went to reach for his fleece jacket, until he remembered that Stiles had it. That was so fucking ironic that he had to laugh, and it was with that kind of bittersweet humor that he set out for his parent’s grave.

The Hales had a big plot, just like the Warrens, and there were generations of werewolves and humans buried there, under a patch of bright green grass and a scattering of wildflowers. Derek had never really visited before, and the headstone was a little scruffy, the names of his family printed in peeling black. Derek pressed his thumb against the triskele at the top of the grave and sighed. It hadn’t felt right to bury Laura here. Derek stood in front of the grave and wondered what to do.

“You don’t have breakfast,” Stiles said, from behind him, and he flinched back. He hadn’t even heard him come up. It was the wolfsbane in the grass, dulling his senses, making him more human. “I thought I taught you to bring breakfast.”

“I wasn’t hungry,” Derek said. He turned around and shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling kind of defensive. Stiles looked different. He’d cropped his hair short again, in the same buzz cut he’d had when Derek had first met him. Instead of making him look younger, it just seemed to emphasize how much he’d changed since then. 

“Like it?” he said, scrubbing his hand over his skull in a familiar old nervous gesture. “Turns out being a human lightning rod for someone else's’ magic can kinda burn your hair. I had some bald patches so I thought, let’s chop it all off again.”

“It’s your hair,” Derek said slowly, because it was just his hair. “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Stiles sighed. “Sorry I didn’t come see you. I was kind of mad. You know, about Laura.”

Derek nodded. He didn’t know what to say, like usual, so he didn’t say anything. Stiles took a step forward, hunching his shoulders.

“My mom was there,” he whispered. “I saw her, and I thought maybe, if my will was- anyway. In the end it was Laura. Magic is all about will, you know that right? She wanted to live more than my Mom did. It made me angry, but now I kind of get it. Mom made me that promise, after all.”

Derek stood there feeling completely useless. He wanted to help, but he wasn’t equipped for it. He didn’t have the words. Then he realized that this was _Stiles_ and he didn’t actually need to say anything. So he stepped forward and reached out and touched Stiles, under one eye, softly with his thumb. Stiles smiled.

“You’re so ludicrously hot,” he said, grabbing Derek’s hand so he couldn’t pull it away. “I mean sometimes you give me a boner just by waggling your eyebrows.”

Derek looked down at him, incredulous. He wasn’t entirely sure how he ended up wanting this ridiculous, soft-mouthed, sharp-eyed, sarcastic asshole so much. 

“There they are,” Stiles murmured, stepping closer. They kissed and it was so absurdly easy. Laura had always criticized Derek for making things too complicated, too difficult, but he was pretty sure there was no way to make kissing Stiles difficult. It was literally the easiest thing about them, this kiss, hot and kind of wet and slow. Stiles made a noise against Derek’s bottom lip and tried to shove a hand up the back of his jacket. Derek stopped him, pushing a hand against his chest. The wolfsbane was preventing him from smelling Stiles, from hearing his heartbeat. So instead of going any further, he reached down and took Stiles’ hand.

“Let’s go,” he said. Stiles followed, pressing up beside him, bumping against his arm as he clambered over uneven patches of ground.  

“Can we make out in your car?” he asked, and Derek decided he would delay answering until he could demonstrate. Words not required.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have a tumblr: http://joosetta.tumblr.com so feel free to add me there! I also draw, occasionally.


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